Lion at the Rhino Wallow

Dan Otte contributed ANOTHER story about lions.

In Zululand I had a second and third meetings with lions at night. My fellow cricket collector Bill Cade and I had been collecting at St. Lucia Bay and were returning to Hlabisa after midnight. From the coastal plain a gravel road winds through rolling bush country up to a high grassy hill then descends again briefly before making its final ascent to Hlabisa. Hlabisa village began as a mission station established by my grandfather nearly a hundred years ago. Even then the lions no longer existed there, for they had been shot out by hunters seeking adventure in northern Zululand. But due to conservation efforts the lions are back.

Coming around a bend we came upon two enormous male lions standing in the road. As I drove up to them they walked to the side of the road and laid down. Bill was asleep. I poked him gently and pointed out his window.

"What's going on?" he asked, groggily, and then almost immediately, "OH, MAN!"

After a good long look he asked: "Weren't we planning to collect around here tomorrow night?"

I said: "Yes. We'll be O.K. " At that time I believed that we would be quite safe, though I became much more apprehensive after hearing that after a ranger had been killed nearby.

The following day: The river bed was dry. We stopped in the middle of it and contemplated the dense forest and reeds which loomed close about us. Although earlier in the day this had promised to be an excellent place to collect, we began to lose our nerve in the gloom of evening, and the presence of lion footprints around the car convinced us that it was perhaps foolhardy to leave the car here; and so we drove up onto a well-grazed grassland with only scattered thorn trees. Now, at least we would be able to see about us. At the crest of a hill we were attracted to the ringing sound of numerous crickets some 50 yards from the road. It was a concentration of crickets in a rhino wallow. With no water in the wallow, we thought it unlikely that a rhino would molest us, so collecting was going to be superb. We captured one cricket after another and became quite absorbed by our good luck. Occasionally we briefly shone our lights about, but seeing nothing returned to our crouched positions. We were busy extracting a cricket from a muddy burrow with a straw when suddenly there was a loud growl.

"What the hell is that?" Bill whispered.

"Lion! Time to go!" I said. We spotted the lion almost immediately.

"To the car!"

We continued to shine our lights in the direction of the lion but it was no longer visible. Like the Serengeti lion, this one had looked at our lights only momentarily and then become invisible as it looked away. We walked rapidly and should have reached the car in just a few seconds. But we had already walked too far and there was no car! We stood there puzzled, listening, looking, frightened. The sounds of hundreds of frogs ahead of us told us that we had gone in the wrong direction.

"We've come the wrong way."

Bill was silent as he swiveled around, piercing the darkness with his headlamp.

"We'll have to go back to the wallow and get our bearings."

"Oh, Wonderful!," was all he managed to say. We walked back, lights flashing nervously back and forth. Back at the wallow we could see the car plainly and we walked quickly towards it. We sat in the car for some time with hearts pounding.

Farther along the track we were soon attracted to an unusual cricket song which neither of us recognized. After locating the cricket singing at the mouth of a burrow, I reached for my hunting knife which I use to extracting crickets from. It was not in its sheath.

"My knife's back at the wallow. We'll have to go back."

"You're JOKING!"

"I'm serious."

"How about buying another knife?"

I explained to him that I had had the knife since I was twelve. That it was from Lang's Sporting Goods in Decorah, Iowa, and that it meant a lot to me.

Bill was reluctant to go, and I'm sure he wondered whether I valued my knife more than my life. We approached the wallow again hoping that we would not see the lion. When we found the knife we decided to quit for the night.

The potential seriousness of this encounter was impressed upon me later at Umfolozi. An incident had taken place in the late afternoon. Two rangers on patrol were returning to camp on horseback. They were riding single file along a gentle slope between two hills unaware that they were being stalked by lions. They had done this on many occasions without incident and were relaxed as they rode along.

The attack came quickly and without warning. Certainly there was no time to avoid the rush. As the lions closed in, the horses went into a gallop, but the lions were on both sides now and converged on the man in the rear. As the ranger in front galloped away he could hear his companion being attacked and heard his last desperate shouts: "He's got me!” There was nothing to do but race back to camp to get help. Armed with guns, the team rode to the site of the attack. Only a part of his skull and a leg bone remained.

Collecting crickets on the Serengeti in 1980

Dan Otte contributed this story about lions.

Beyond the reach of my beam I could make out a black line of trees. They were like a wall beyond which I dared not venture. "Stay near the car; there are predators about." Dick had warned.

Cricket collecting was going to be excellent. October rains had turned the plains of Kirawira green and an afternoon thunderstorm had left pools of water standing in the slight depressions; by evening these were ringing with the steady purr of mole crickets.

It was getting dark by the time we parked the Land Cruiser in the center of an immense clearing, and while Dick prepared supper, I collected my gear and prepared for my cricket hunt.

Surrounded by the sounds of half a dozen or more crickets belonging to species that I did not recognize, I quickly forgot Dick's warning.

"Don't worry," I had told him, "no place for predators to stalk me here." The grass was cropped a short as a golf course.

Catching crickets demands one's full attention-line up the song, shift position, line up again, then approach the intersection of the imaginary lines. Thus preoccupied, I was drawn some distance from the car. Between catches I shone my light around the plain, but I saw nothing.

I eventually succeeded in catching each of the species I heard. Only one species eluded me. I shifted my position from time to time in my attempt to triangulate on his position. I waited in the darkness, using my light only to get a new sighting. Finally I succeeded in pinpointing the cricket under a small tuft of grass and captured him.

As I triumphantly slipped him into a vial I heard Dick shouting:

"Dan, get back here, there's a lion." I wheeled about, shining my light in one direction then another. And to my left I saw him- just a pair of eyes-not more that 50 paces away. The lion looked at me briefly then looked away.

"Get back here! Don't run, just walk!"

I walked, and shone my light continuously in the direction of the lion, but I could not see him-only the open plain and the silhouettes of low hills beyond. I reached the car.

"Take a look." I peered through the infrared glasses and saw a huge male lion sitting on his haunches staring at us. Shortly he got up and walked off and began roaring loudly. I tape recorded him for future enjoyment.

I had not felt any danger. I had attracted him, no doubt, though I could not know why. Had I been approached out of curiosity or as prey? A few days earlier I had spent an afternoon watching lions in the company of lion experts. It had been clinical; the history of each lion was known; the prognosis of their fate was calculated. There was no danger and no mystery; they might as well have been house cats. Lions in daylight cause little emotional impact. But at night they change. A tame caged lion at Usa River was a wretched creature during the day, but at night his immense roars converted him into an animal of impressive power.

My bed that night straddled the seats in the Land Cruiser and Dick slept on top of the roof rack. It was a safe place to be, or perhaps it felt safer than it actually was. It was certainly safer than sleeping in a tent, or on top of the Land Cruiser. I don't know why Dick thought he was safe on top of the vehicle. An acquaintance of Dicks had done the latter in the Kaoko-veld in northern Namibia and had almost come to his end. He and a friend had turned in one night without even the protection afforded by a tent. In the middle of the night he woke up to excruciating pain. A lion was biting into his feet, through the sleeping bag, and was dragging him off. He screamed with all his might, but the lion would not let go. Though he had gone to sleep with a double barrel shotgun by his side he had been dragged from it. His terrified and confused friend had trouble locating the gun in the dark. When she found it she quickly handed it to him. He fired both barrels at once, but into the air and not at the lion. Luckily the lion let go and disappeared into the night. It takes an ardent conservationist not to kill in such circumstances, I thought.

I fell asleep to the sounds of lions roaring in the distance.

No animal, however fast, has greater speed than a charging lion over a distance of a few yards. It is a speed faster than thought-faster always than escape.
Beryl Markham

Late Night Visitors at Flatdogs

Our first story of a close encounter in Africa was submitted by Jerry Graf, author of "Zambia: A Travelogue." The following is an excerpt from his book. Posted 4 April 2006.

It was about 3:30 AM when Dan poked me in the shoulder to wake me up. He signaled for me to be quiet and pointed to look behind me. Our tent was sitting on the platform, and we had again left the rain fly off so it was like being outside. There was an elephant eating from a tree that stood four or five steps from our tent. It had its back end pointing directly at us, not more than ten feet away. It was huge, and from our prospective, I could tell that it was a bull elephant. We had seen lots of elephants, and read that they frequently came into camp. I also read that it was important to be quiet so they wouldn’t be startled and that they would just step over tent ropes and not bother us. For some reason I believed what I had read and very calmly watched and listened to this monster pachyderm dine on a tree. It sounded like I was listening to a hay baler as it used its trunk to strip leaves and twigs from the branches and then chew and swallow them. Apparently its mother had never insisted on chewing with its mouth closed.

We watched and listened and soon saw a second elephant coming to join the party. It was another bull, and bigger than the first. What a sight. This was truly the real Africa! When they moved to a tree that was about thirty yards away, Dan felt it was okay to talk, and told me that he awakened to a huge eyeball looking into our tent. It was like the scene in the movie Jurassic Park when the dinosaur looked through the car windshield. We sat telling each other how awesome it was to be that close to two bull elephants. We were also wondering if the rest of our group was witnessing this amazing spectacle.

We weren’t ready to go back to sleep, and within a few minutes, we heard another elephant approaching from the opposite direction. Apparently the dinner invitations had gone to all the adult males in the herd. He was dining on the tree whose branches actually hung over our tent. It worked its way around to our side of the tree and then walked right next to the platform we were on. On the way by, it appeared to touch the platform with its trunk. When we got up, we found that he had left a ball of chewed foliage about the size of a goose egg.

We were now keeping track of three elephants that were really working over the smaller trees in the campground. At one point, one of them put his head against a tree and pushed it down. The tree was about six inches in diameter, but was easily toppled. This could’t possibly get any better.

We had been watching elephants for about an hour, when number four arrived. He was helping himself to the tree closest to our platform. As we watched, it looked like it was working its way along a path between our platform and the tree. Dan and I both felt that the platform was right next to the tree and there was no way for several tons of elephant to get through. We were wrong. It managed to walk through the eye of a needle, and for a few seconds I was only 4 or 5 feet from the giant. I’m glad he chose to ignore me.

In all, the four big bulls spent about two hours around our tent. When they finally left the campground at about 5:30 AM, Dan and I walked over to where the rest of our group was to compare notes. Alec had spent the time in his tree high above the elephants and watched them wander around the campground. Kevin had watched from his tent on the ground, but he didn’t have any stories of them getting very close to him. The Cades had stayed in their tent. Since they had their rain fly on, they were able to hear the elephants and knew they were around, but weren’t able to watch them as closely as the rest of us had.

Otte’s story was the best. Before going to bed, he had moved the red truck close to a clump of bushes, and then moved his tent right next to the bush and the truck. He felt that he was getting himself out of the open area where any elephants that came through might walk. When he woke up in the middle of the night, there was an elephant eating from another bush near to his tent. Its rear end was very close to his tent as it dined on the greenery, and as Otte explained he was hoping that it wouldn’t fart, dump a load on his tent, or worst of all back up and step on him. Fortunately none of those things happened, but the elephant did turn around to face him and decided to eat from the bush on the far side of the tent. It simply reached over Otte and his tent and pulled leaves into its mouth. This was way to close for comfort.

Everyone had great stories, and nobody got hurt, but most of the group felt like they had had enough danger for one trip. By our third night at Flatdogs, all but one tent, the Cade’s, was off the ground. Dan and I stayed on our low platform, but Kevin and Otte took over two spots in trees that had been vacated.