Born Wild by Tony Fitzjohn Page B

he didn’t like being called it to his face. He held Moi’s hand, looked him straight in the eye, and said, ‘I’m after your job, sir.’
    In those days I slept on many people’s floors and was the mostappalling houseguest. Kit and Sandy Dickinson put up with me for years before they temporarily threw me out after a particularly reprehensible evening when I brought back two young ladies who were in need of a place to rest. I was at least able to return a small part of their hospitality when Sandy and some friends came up to Kora to see the total eclipse. They crashed on the way but arrived on the night before the eclipse and set up camp within the wire. None of us had ever seen an eclipse before and were astounded by what we witnessed. Kora was always quiet and peaceful – particularly after the organ-bruising drive from Nairobi – but however quiet it is in the bush it’s never entirely silent. Crickets chirrup, babblers scuttle in the trees, superb starlings chatter to each other. There is always noise in the background even in the very dead of night.
    When the moon crossed the sun above Kora all that changed. Croakey and Crikey, George’s fan-tailed ravens, flew off to roost on Kora Rock’s sheer face. The hornbills took off for their night trees, and the vulturine guinea fowl flew up on to the roofs of the huts. Everything slowed down and stopped. All creatures were still. No one spoke for the duration – at more than seven minutes, it would be the longest eclipse for the next five hundred years.
    Jack Barrah had come into the Game Department a generation after George and was now a senior adviser at Wildlife HQ. He often came into camp in the early seventies and was invaluable to us in dealing with the authorities. A former colonial game warden, he was particularly valued by the new administration in the Game Department for his fairness, knowledge and integrity, and for his skill at getting the best out of often resentful and cantankerous Europeans. He had seen how Kora was being invaded ever more regularly by illegal herders and how the council did nothing about it. We couldn’t rely on having supportive police and army chiefs in Garissa for ever so he pushed for Korato be made into a game reserve. This would provide it with some protection, put the area on the map and de-gazette it as a hunting block. While still under the auspices of the distant Hola County Council, it would be given a warden and some rangers to show that it was an official wildlife area.
    This was a brilliant and necessary idea and much more than George and I could have hoped for but it needed a lot of work. In August Jack made two trips with council members, in very rough flying conditions, to sell the idea to them, and it was only after he had delivered them all back that he revealed to us he had had a bug flying around inside his skull all night. He was in agony as the creature crawled around his ear canal, buzzing like a benchsaw. I suggested I box his ears but ended up shining a torch into his ear and out flew the bug. Just like that!
    On 19 October 1974 his efforts and planning came to fruition and Kora was declared a game reserve, a change in its status that offered it much more protection than when it had merely been property rented from Hola County Council. It also gave us a bit more legitimacy that helped in attracting benefactors and freed us from paying the rent, which had gone up to £1,250 a year – a fortune for George at that time. The lions now had a real home that was recognized by the wildlife authorities – but there weren’t many of them left.
    Around the time that Lisa disappeared, Christian started going away for longer and longer periods. We were happy that he was finding his feet and daring to go on long walkabouts but were worried that he might stray towards human habitation or come across the increasingly frequent illegal grazers invading Kora from the north. I