Surviving The Tsavo

If you had told me that I would become famous, I wouldn’t have believed you. What for? All Ghost and I ever did was try to survive. But now we are studied around the country, the continent, and even scholars and historians from around the world use us as case studies. I’ll admit, some of the stories written are funny, others are outright disrespectful – why hate on lions when our nature is to feed? Well, I’ve had enough of being referred to as a terrorist, so here’s what really happened. 

The swelting heat of the Tsavo in the late 1890s was enough to make any man, animal and insect go mad. It dried up all streams and created a craving for death. There was some disease that had gone round, and killed all our prey, and those of us who’d eaten the infected prey died. In the end, what was left of our pride was Ghost and me. And I had this horrible tooth ache that made hunting our typical prey difficult – not that we’d had much luck with that, but I remember a gazelle getting away from me when I couldn’t trap her between my teeth.

After what seemed like weeks of scavenging for a decent meal, Ghost spotted signs of life in one of our lesser visited areas.  I was behind him, my energy low, feeling weary, when his body language told me that food was in the horizon. I should have been excited but we’d had two or three false alarms by then, and I was tired. But his insistence made me draw closer to him, and there they were, a group of men, of different heights and sizes, busy building something. 

All Ghost and I saw was food, but we needed to be tactical. We knew how men were. We had dealt with other warriors in the region previously, and they’d killed some of our own. But there was something different about this group; they looked different and so we assumed they were different, but if we were going to take a risk, we needed to do it in the best way possible. So, we waited.  

The thing about wanting to do something right is that you must take your time, even when hunger makes you hallucinate or react in the most bizarre way. But like I said, we waited.  

Our best chance of getting our food was in the dead of night, when these foreign humans were asleep. And so, our first meal heist was at night. Maybe that’s how I acquired the name Darkness… but I digress. We crept into one of the tents and pounced on the sleeping humans. I remember that first bite, even as he screamed, for me it was a satisfaction. He was easy to chew, and I took my time unbothered by Ghost and his prey. More screams followed. It seemed word had gone round that we were in the camp. But I didn’t care. After several bites, I dragged my meal out and walked back home. 

The next nine months were somewhat blissful to say the least. We scared the humans, but we got our meals… we survived. And then one of them killed Ghost. I was angry, determined to kill more of them – not just for food, but to scare them for what they did to my brother. I probably didn’t think this through enough because 20 days later, I faced my own fate. 

I can’t tell you how many kills we made. For me it was about getting my meal, being satisfied. Ok, if you insist, it was probably between 50 and 100 people building that railway across the Tsavo. 

Now I stand frozen in time, with Ghost beside me, at the Field Museum in Chicago. I mean, the least these people could do is send us back home, to a museum in Kenya. Anyway…