Born Wild by Tony Fitzjohn Read Free Book Online Page B

really able to look on humans with the warmth we felt from Christian and Lisa. At times she tried to be like the others, but it was too much for her. The damage had been done and she was always careful with Man.
    Every week or so I would drive for about an hour and a halfto Asako, the closest village to our camp at Kora, and buy meat for the lions. Almost inevitably it would take longer – a leaf spring on the Land Rover would break, I would get stuck or have a puncture or two. The Trust that George and I created has done a lot of work in Asako over the last twenty years, but forty years ago there was nothing there except a few huts and some mangy livestock. There was no dispensary, no school, no security, no Land Rover ‘taxis’ to our main town Garissa, no shops even, just a crocodile-infested river crossing to Mbalambala on the far bank and three islands, famed for their enormous elephants. The people of Asako are from a small tribe called the Korokoro. No one really knows their ancestry. Terence was convinced they were the indigenous people of that area, others that they are a subset of the much more numerous Oromo people of Ethiopia. For years they had been subjected to raids from both the Oromo and the Somalis. Scattered throughout the length of Kora are large stone mounds, supposed to be thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Oromo, or Galla – an ancient tribe from the Ethiopian border – graves.
    The Maalim, or spiritual leader, of Asako was a great supporter of George and our lion project and, along with the village chief, would encourage his people to sell us livestock, which we would feed to the lions. This was an expensive way of doing things, but although we had permission to shoot for the pot outside the boundaries of Kora, we had all developed a distaste for killing wild animals – George and Terence after a lifetime spent working on game and predator control. Buying our meat from Asako had the advantage of providing the Korokoro villagers with a little extra money, which they desperately needed. The meat also helped a great deal in luring the lions back to camp in the evenings and meant that we could supplement their diets when they were learning how to hunt.
    Maalim Shora Dirkicha, to give him his full family name,would look around for likely cows for us. He still lives there today and, although pencil thin, can walk thirty miles a day in intense heat without batting an eyelid. We looked for beasts that would cost as little as possible. Even though they were for feeding to the lions, we always had them killed by the village in the Muslim way before taking them back to camp for butchering.
    Butchering was a messy process at which I soon became expert. First I would remove the skin from the cow and the meat from the bones. I chopped the meat into two-kilo chunks and the skin into squares, then hung the meat overnight. If the lions weren’t about we would put the carcass into the back of the Land Rover and drive around with it in the hope of attracting them. If they were near camp we tied it to a tree with all the guts and lungs hanging out, a strong chain through the pelvic girdle. This allowed us to have a good long look at the lions as they were interacting with each other and meant that wild lions were unable to steal the carcass. Over a very long period this had the effect of bringing the wild and introduced lions together. There’s nothing like meeting for a meal to kick-start a relationship.
    The meat went into the elderly propane gas fridge that we shared with the lions. Incredibly temperamental, gas fridges were the only way to keep things cool at Kora; thank God we have solar fridges today, which are so much easier to deal with. Each gas fridge has its own personality, seldom pleasant, and must be lit and fuelled with great care. As with the even more dangerous paraffin fridges, if you get it badly wrong, the fridge blows up and burns down your camp – this happened to