Sara Evans - When the Last Lion Roars: The Rise and Fall of the King of the Beasts

NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Sara Evans is an award-winning writer, specialising intravel and wildlife. Her work has featured in numerouspublications around the globe, including the Sunday Telegraph,Saturday Telegraph Magazine, The Independent on Sunday,The Australian, The Boston Globe, BBC Wildlife Magazine andAfrica Geographic.

A former speaker at Bradt travel-writing seminars, she isalso the author of The Travel Industry Uncovered and The RealLife Guide to Travel and Tourism . After spending much of hertime travelling and looking for some of the worlds mostamazing animals, Sara now lives in the Fens with her family.

@SaraTEvans

For my father, David Evans, whose dream was to travel to Africa and see lions in the wild. He died when he was forty-five, before he was able to travel to the continent. This book is written in his memory.

Until the lion has its own storyteller, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

Contents

Thank you to all of my family, but most especially my husband Conor Jameson, my son Jacob Pake (thank you so much for building me a wonderful website), my mother Deirdre Hume and dear sissie Carrie Betts for your ongoing support and encouragement while writing the book. Not forgetting my lion-hearted friends Francesca Ryan and Isabel King for doing the same.

I would also like to express my gratitude to a top daughter-and-father team comprising Isabel and Daniel King whom I consider grammar royalty for sharing their editorial skills as I put the book together. At Bloomsbury, I would like to thank Lisa Thomas for her guidance regarding the books early chapters, my editor Jenny Campbell for her kindness, support and pertinent advice and Myriam Birch for her copy-editing prowess and expertise.

Likewise, my gratitude goes as well to Tim Jepson for commissioning my first travel piece and kick-starting my travel-writing career and enabling me to encounter wildlife all over the world.

Ross Barnett and Simon Black: I thank you both for your advice and for sharing your extraordinary knowledge about lion evolution and genetics with me. In a similar vein, I would also like to thank David Macdonald and his team at WildCRU for sharing their time, important research findings and enormous conservation expertise. And, of course, gratitude to and admiration for all the hands-on people working in Africa and India to help keep lions alive in difficult and often dangerous circumstances. Lions still roar because of you.

At the Akagera National Park in Rwanda, I send my thanks to Sarah Hall and Jes Gruner, and also Maddy Uwase and Nathan Mwesige, who helped me look for the countrys only lions. At the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), my thanks go to Donna Campanella and Gitanjali Bhattacharya, and at the Aspinall Foundation I thank Amanda McCabe. I would also like to thank Salisha Chandra, Paul Thomson and Shavini Bhalla. Im so sorry I wasnt able to visit your projects in Kenya.

For kind permission to use their wonderful images, I must thank Akagera National Park, the Aspinall Foundation, Patrick Aventurier, the Caverne du Pont dArc, Sarah Hall, Dave Rolfe, Daniel Sprawson, David Toovey, Gal Vande Weghe and ZSL.

I would also like to thank Panthera and Ross Barnett for allowing the cartographer, Brian Southern, to recreate their maps for use in this book.

And, finally, a very special and a very big thank you to the kind and generous people who helped me travel to Rwanda and visit the lion reintroduction project at Akagera National Park. They include: Rebecca Bearn, Carrie Betts, Kevin Betts, Esther Cameron, Phill Capstick, Camila Cavalcante, Kate Chase, Ian Foulsham, Rachel Gill, Dilys Gladwell, Paul Golding, Deirdre Hume, Anita Kerai, Alan McCredie, Patrick Minne, Mike Perry and Mads Petersen. I am also grateful for the support of the Marriott Hotel in Kigali, who demonstrated their support for wildlife by providing a complimentary overnight stay. Likewise, I also thank the Akagera Game Lodge and Tented Camp for their hospitality and discounted rates.

I first saw wild lions in South Africa. I was at the Madikwe Game Reserve, in the north-west of the country. It was first light, and my first time in Africa. Bar the haunting cries of a solitary fish eagle slicing through the early morning mist, all was quiet.

The peace was soon broken by polite chatter, though, as I joined four other guests for a dawn drive into the bush. David, our guide, had just started telling us about the animals we might encounter, when some vultures circling overhead caught his eye.

Come, he said, we must head towards the vultures. Theyre a sign that something has been killed, and where there are dead things there may be big cats, too.

After driving for around five minutes, we pulled up by a large acacia tree. Towards the top of the tree, straddling a branch, was a leopard. Apart from its tail flicking from side to side, slow and steady like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, the leopard was motionless. The pale fur around its mouth was stained brownish-red with blood and earth. In front of it, wedged into a fork in the branch, was a warthog, its eyes bulging, blood dripping slowly from its neck.

The leopard leaned forwards and licked blood lazily from the warthogs back. Then it stopped abruptly and looked quickly down from the tree. Not towards us in the jeep, but at two young male lions probably brothers that had just swaggered into view. Confident as princes, they padded slowly around the base of the tree. It wasnt just the vultures, still circling above, that had spotted the chance for a free breakfast.

The larger of the two lions raked its claws on the trunk of the tree, craning his neck in the direction of the leopard and warthog. Then he began to climb up. The leopard reacted quickly, clamping its jaws around the prize. In what seemed like a split second, the leopard descended from the tree, prey in tow.

As soon as the leopard landed, the lions moved in. Rather than head into nearby bush cover, though, the leopard moved around the acacia instead. In slapstick fashion, the lions followed the leopard around the tree. They circled madly for a while until the leopard, exhausted, dropped the warthog and retreated to the bushes.

One of the lions followed the leopard but soon returned only to find his sibling tucking into the warthog. As he approached, the lion with the warthog made a run for it, pursued swiftly by his brother. And thats the last we saw of the two marauding lions, their heist successfully completed, a culinary ambush executed perfectly, feline style.

Meanwhile, back in the jeep, wed been library-quiet, transfixed as we watched the big-cat drama play out. We talked about what wed just seen. I soon realised how fortunate Id been, not just to see lions and a leopard during my first ten minutes in the bush, but to watch an entire wild story unfold before me.

Until then, the only flesh-and-blood lions Id seen were some sleepy-looking lions at London Zoo, the dozy stars of a school trip. The others I had seen were in my imagination. There was Aslan, the magical and mysterious talking lion in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , and of course, Elsa, the Born Free lioness raised by Joy and George Adamson after being orphaned, and then returned successfully to the wilds of Kenya.

There were also the big cats on childrens TV programmes from the 1960s and 70s, like Tarzan , Daktari and Animal Magic . Sometimes too, when I was allowed to stay up late, there were the wild lions on nature documentaries, such as The World About Us . Most of the lions were fictional, a few had been real, but they all felt remote and untouchable. The Madikwe lions were vivid. They were blood, tooth and claw, as real and undeniable as daylight, and I was captivated.