Free Born Wild by Tony Fitzjohn Page A

strange life for a hot-blooded twenty-seven-year-old to be living but I knew it was the right one. I felt I was doing something useful at last. I was enormously stimulated and I was incredibly happy in those halcyon days at Kora.
    After I had been living at Kampi ya Simba for about three months, George and I set off for the river in the early morning as usual. The car was out of action so we walked down together and were soon sitting by the Tana drinking our gin from the flask. Christian, Lisa and, at a distance, Juma dozed quietly beside us. Suddenly Christian’s ears twitched up and his body tensed. We followed his gaze and saw a large herd of elephants emergingsilently from the forest downstream. Crocodiles slipped into the muddy waters of the Tana to avoid their enormous feet, outraged hippos lurched out of the way, spraying shit with their tails. The elephants marched stolidly across the beach, waded through the shallows, then swam the hundred yards across the river to Meru, shepherding the younger ones and protecting them against the current. It was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. George turned to me and said, ‘How long do you think you can stay?’
    â€˜About ten or fifteen years,’ I replied.
    1 My thanks to Adrian House and Collins Harvill for permission to quote from The Great Safari. My Pride and Joy and The Great Safari were very helpful for checking the chronology of my life with George.

3. One of the Pride
    Fromthe moment Christian sat on my feet and licked my hand on my second day at Kora I was hooked for life. I soon discovered that if you treat lions with respect, understanding and love they respond with their trust and affection. Once they’ve given you that they don’t take it back and neither shpould you. I loved being with the lions like nothing I had ever before experienced. It wasn’t entirely from self-interest that I was enraged when, a few months after I’d arrived, Ken Smith came into camp and said he was closing George down. Ken was the warden of Garissa and one of George’s oldest friends. As such, I always felt that he should have given us more support than he did. He had helped George to find Kora for which George had given him some of the earnings from Christian the Lion so the fact that he always caved in to pressure irked us both. The problem was that he was white with a government job and, back then, very few Europeans dared rock the boat. We found over and over again that Europeans and white Kenyans would support us with words, but it was the black Kenyans who helped us with action. With this in mind, I headed for Nairobi to see John Mutinda, who had just been appointed chief game warden.
    John’s office was in one of those crazy old falling-down colonial buildings that never seemed to get repaired. Up on stilts with a warped veranda and a leaking corrugated-iron roof, it had a temporary air that belied its age. John was a Mkamba, a member of the tribe whose lands bordered Kora. An academic, he always seemed rather bemused by but fond of the old colonials he had inherited as game wardens. He presided over the Game Department’s later merger with the National Parks Authority but theresulting body’s passionate embrace of corruption did not occur on his watch. He had the power to close us down at any minute but instead, after only a little persuasion, he allowed us to continue with our controversial project to reintroduce lions to the wild. This was my first interaction with the wildlife authorities – and a rare good one. Beating the system and actually achieving anything would become harder and harder. Back then it was easy. John had a few words of warning for me as I left the Game Department: ‘ Just keep it safe, Tony,’ he said, as I skipped out of his office, like a schoolboy who’d been let off a detention.
    I went out and celebrated long into the night and was back on the road to Kora at dawn. I