In the Bush: A Most-Excellent East African Adventure

Photographs by Tom Gorman

One in a Series

It was still dark when Homer roused me for our first full day in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, a place locals know as the Mara.

Five bells. The groggy hour. I needed coffee.

In the dimly-lit tent, Homer moved about scouting for pills and camera lenses. Shirt off, posture stooped, hairy back exposed, with his prominent brow, he looked a bit like Early Man lurking in the predawn gloom.

An hour later, we’d be told that the grunting and chuffing noises that had kept me awake were the work of a family of hippos that lived in the muddy river outside our tent. At night, they came up onto the shoreline to graze and feed. 

And while they might look like innocent Teletubbies characters, hippos are among the most lethal forces in the wild, with a natural aggression to perceived threats. 

They’ve even killed people, like the two bumbling washed-up journalists fumbling in the dark of our tent.

At one point, Homer buttoned up a loud collared-shirt that seemed straight from some 1950s Sears & Roebuck catalogue, a thing you might wear to the bowling alley, or a carnival.

"I've got something new on today," he gushed. "I think the animals will like me."

Dawn threatened. With time running out, we couldn’t work the French press coffee device and then bungled the walkie-talkie dispatch to call for an escort.

So we were forced to break Safari Rule #1, two old fools bumbling alone outside into the predator’s kill zone, clueless and unguarded, bickering like two spinsters primed for slaughter in a B-grade slasher film.

Doh!

Luckily, our Masai minder, a quiet, unassuming man named Shadrack, was waiting in the murk, spear and flashlight in hand, dressed in a traditional red tartan blanket.

We quickly took our places inside the land cruiser, this time, forsaking the far back where unforeseen bumps would send us flying as though catapulted by some ejection seat. And after the previous evening’s fiasco, we strapped on our safety belts.

Our guide, Julius, sat in the driver’s seat, smiling.

“Oh,” he said, so you’re strapped in today?”

And so off we went, into the wild.

There’s a saying about ineptitude, about the hapless inmates taking over the asylum, and that’s precisely what happened that first morning on the Mara.

A safari guide’s mission is to get his wards to the places where the animals are, using his own knowledge and radio tips from other drivers. 

Nature photography has its own skill set, but even the pros are only as good as their guides, relying on them to put those high-priced cameras into their best position.

Apparently, Julius was taking us to a place called Rhino Ridge, where a resident pride of lions gathered for a few hours each morning. The night’s hunt behind them, the adults would lounge in the tall grasses as the cubs frolicked, before the entire group moved into the thicket for a daylong slumber to avoid the sun.

For hungry photographers, this is the so-called Money Shot. Opportunities abounded. It was Crunch Time, the very reason we’d traveled so far in the first place.

Yet Homer and his sidekick somehow did not fathom this. 

We continually prompted Julius to stop the truck for some faux artistic snaps of the sun rising next to some forlorn-looking single acacia tree out on the horizon.

Cool shots, to be sure, but the neither the lions, nor the rest of the marauding Safari brigade, was going to wait for us. 

Not by a long shot.

When we finally arrived at Rhino Ridge, the lions were there, sure enough, but so were two dozen other land cruisers from various tour groups. It was like a celebrity press conference, with the trucks forming a tight semi-circle around the oblivious talent.

The lions looked over at the scrum, yawned and lay their heads down in the soft grass.

As the drivers tell it, lions view these big vehicles as fellow denizens of the savanna, perhaps a fast-moving herd of elephants, and will saunter unconcerned among the trucks packed with gawking tourists. 

It’s only when a human steps out of the vehicle that the predator’s instincts come into play. “Hey, there’s something out there on two legs. Let’s go see what’s for lunch.” 

You were safe, as long as you stayed put inside the vehicle.

The ongoing feeding frenzy of vehicles that surrounded the pride was all rather civil, of course, because no professional Safari guide wants to get any reputation among his peers for being an aggressive space hog at any animal photo-op. 

There’s no such thing as road rage out here. Still, the scene was like a neighborhood Starbucks — the first arrivals claimed their space and refused to budge, spreading their computers on a table for four, ready to selfishly settle in for the day.

While Julius did his best, angling here and there for Homer and I to get the best shots, my first views of lions in the wild were blocked by the fat heads of my fellow humans with front-row seats.

And here’s the thing about African nature photography: When you see those vivid, intimate, close-ups of, say, a mother lion and her cubs, it looks like the shooter was there on his or her lonesome, luxuriating in this exclusive access to the wild.

But no, that’s apparently not how it usually works. If you panned out a bit from that Discovery Channel or Nat Geo close-up, you’d see the hoards of other tourists and lookie-loos, in a passive-aggressive clamor for position and dominance. 

This is our fault, of course. With all the poaching, intrusion on habitat and other crimes perpetrated by we homo sapiens, there just aren’t enough wild animals to go around.

So we humans hover like field vultures, encircling the very endangered creatures we are slowly edging toward extinction.

Then the cavalry came.

Suddenly, land cruisers in both the front and the back of the action began to peel off like insects after the the kitchen light is turned on, their passengers grabbing for their boxed lunches, holding on for dear life.

“The park rangers are here,” announced Julius, starting the engine.

It was your Kenyan tax dollars in action, teams of armed officers who roam the parks armed with AK-47s to ward off poachers and make sure that the tourist armies aren’t harassing the animals. They are on hand to ensure that nature takes its own course.

They don’t pay these protectors enough. 

Still, as the watchdogs arrived, the lions looked on lazily, not the least bit impressed.

We moved on, scanning the horizon, listening for our fellow guide’s short-wave radio tips of another sighting, another opportunity to add to our photo albums.

But what no one wants to admit is that most of were here for one single reason.

Bloodshed.

We all wanted to capture that lurid Kodak Moment of a predator moving in for the kill. We lusted to see a pair of cheetahs accelerate to 80 miles an hour to bring down a hapless gazelle, or hyenas working in harmony to swarm some blundering wildebeest.

That’s when drivers rumble along deeply-rutted cavity-loosening roads, some making dashes across the open savanna, so we tourists can focus our zoom lenses, move our videos to slow motion to better capture the gore.

We’re all waiting for that precise moment of the kill, like those hounding French paparazzi awaiting Princess Diana and the big crash.

In our days in East Africa, we saw bloodied bones drying in the sun, already picked clean, having arrived many hours late of the action. A few times, we watched vultures peck and squabble over a recent kill. 

We saw hyenas defending their meal from those predatory birds, jumping and snarling, bearing their teeth, only to have the buzzards light and then quickly land, now even closer to the action.

At one kill site, a lone hyena crept too close to a mother lion gorging on a kill and was sent squealing, the left side of its body left crimson-red from a powerful paw swipe.

At the first scent of blood, the first prospect of real violence, the brigades of bush vehicles appear, their overfed inhabitants, fattened by gourmet dinners and endless bottles of Tusker beers served back at camp, jockey for position inside the truck like sumo wrestlers with cameras.

It wasn’t pretty. And Homer and I were part of the scrum. 

In our days in East Africa, we never saw anything killed, never saw a living being draw its final breath, but we came close.

One rainy morning inside the Ngornongoro Crater in Tanzania, we came upon a Cape Buffalo mother hurrying its days-old calf toward the protection of the herd that grazed in the distance. 

The mother walked ahead, turning to chase off a solitary hyena that had snuck on up the calf, biting its ear, sending it sprawling to the ground.

For half an hour, we watched the drama unfold: the mother tried to rouse the calf, which finally came to its feet, while the hyena lurked just a few feet away.

Finally, we moved on, later learning that the patient hyena had at last gotten its meal.

In the end, you felt sorry for that buffalo calf or the lone wildebeest singled out among the many thousands that moved like an army across the landscape, toothy lions with razor-like paws pulling it towards its death, as its brethren run past in panic.

What could its final thoughts possibly be?

Other than, “Oh Lord, why me?”