The Spirit Lions Tracking the Magical Man-eaters of Tanzania  Copyright 2007 By Robert R. Frump     On the evening we lured in the man-eater, we were in the rough bush in the south of Tanzania, in the mud-hut regions, far away from tourist Africa, on the fringe of the Great Selous Game Reserve, tired and frustrated, ready to pack it in.   The last recordings of the dying wildebeest screams were chased across the savannah by the last recordings of the snarls of a feeding pride of lions.  The sound effects had blasted out via four-foot high speakers and were designed to lure the big cats in.  Nothing roared back.  Again.   Just another no-show night after an exhausting day of hustling up small bloody bits of bait, cutting brush and camouflaging humane lion traps with elephant dung.  Building the Snares – Simpson sets his trap as Ikanda looks on. We could do stupid things when we were this bone tired and I was about to pop the back door of the Land Cruiser and walk over to the nearby Land Rover when Ellen, the sound expert on the German documentary crew, unconsciously grasped my upper harm hard, whispered something in German, then said to me, “Behind us.  Always from behind us, I think, we must always look behind us… look there, you see it?” I did.   Like a pouting line backer on a models’ catwalk, all testosterone, all insouciant confidence, he came, not thirty feet from our vehicle, thudding toward us.  There he was:  a very large, near-maneless young lion, and the rose gold light of the setting sun touched off the tiffs of hair, like back-lit peach fuzz on a boy’s smooth face. Then the land sank two-thirds of the sun and he strode toward us still in the twilight as we peered out from our battened-down Land Cruiser.   He was ignoring the scent of the bait and the food it promised, and heading straight toward the Land Rover Defender, where our two Tanzanian colleagues watched spellbound, their windows wide open.  Dennis Ikanda in his Defender 110 Land Rover Only later did Dennis Ikanda, the Tanzanian research scientist in the Defender say he believed a cat of this age in this area had in all probability eaten a human.  Was one of the “Spirit Lions” in other words, or one of the “Ossamas,” as some of the locals called the man-eaters.   One could intelligently and scientifically guess at his human diet, just as one could impala consumption.   “Even though he seemed young, he may already have killed and eaten two or three people,” Ikanda remarked off-hand to us later.  “Almost certainly, he has eaten some human flesh by this time in his life.”   A “Spirit Lion” meters from Harunnah. Still, we meant him no harm.   We wanted him alive.   Alive and accessorized.  We were attempting to humanely trap lions that were suspected of eating humans.   Then we would dart the lions and release them with tracking collars so their movements could be studied.   We hoped this would help the lions; we hoped this would help the people.   We hoped it would explain why the behavior had been increasing and we hoped it could help stop it.     “It” was man-eating.  Even the scientists could come up with no better name.     Anything else – “human eaters” as just one example  – sounded vaguely sci-fi or so stump dumb it was un-utterable.  This was true even though the term “man-eaters” was inaccurate and did not describe the carnivore’s real range of human prey.  The lions were agnostic as to gender, race, age, and religion. They were equal opportunity opportunists.   The villagers simply called man-eaters Spirit Lions.    “Du-dus” was another name. “Ossamas” was a more contemporary appellation.    Or they did not mention them at all for fear naming them would bring the man-eaters down on them.  “Pests of he bush,” they would say.  This was a moderate Islamic area of the country with a sprinkling of Christians, all gentle agrarians for the most part.   But traditional animist beliefs pre-dated Mohammed and Christ and were omnipresent here.   So few locals believed them mortal.   Here spirits still lived everywhere.  In the wind, the air, the animals, even the rocks.  Mizaranga, magic, was real.  When lions began eating humans, the villagers, many of them, believed a sorcerer had created the lion to settle a score or punish someone, even an entire village, for breaking taboo.  Wood and bark huts are no match for lions. You could chase such a lion all you wanted, try to trap it too, but in the end the lion would turn into thin air – or his paw prints into human footprints.  They were shape-shifters who knew what we would do before we did.  Were lions, like werewolves, a product of lycanthropy.  The villagers seemed happy to know we were trying to help, but looking back perhaps they were just laughing their asses off.  They all knew, I thought  later, that there was no way in this realm that we would catch a Spirit Lion without the right mizaranga. Our little party believed in science not superstition, but in the end the villagers may have been more right, for struggle though we did, the Spirit Lions escaped our every effort.  I for one came away from it all with a firm belief that invisible forces did   prevent us from catching lions.   True, my version involved the classic Invisible Hand of economics and free markets, of supply and demand, as opposed to magic potions brewed up by what used to be called witchdoctors.   But that conclusion was far ahead of us.   At the moment, as the man-eater continued his stroll, none of us in the Land Cruiser said a word.  From above, over vehicles must have looked like two Tonka toy trucks in the vastness of the Selous with the figure of the cat just cutting across our front right fender by perhaps 20 feet.   The flat-topped acacia trees and scrub brush of the classic African plains framed the scene. He  came closer, crossing, heading past us, toward the Land Rover where Ikanda and Harunnah Lyimo, my young guide, sat.    In our car, only our bodyguard from the village game protection squad, Rajabu Kiliga nicknamed Pwagu, (“Man of Many Stories,”) was calm.  He sat in crisp green fatigues next to me in the Land Cruiser cradling his single shot shot-gun toward the floor – a totem, really, as the village could not afford ammo and he carried none.  (“It is useless to try to shoot these lions and waste bullets,” he would tell me later, “because if they have eaten someone it means the village has broken a taboo, and we perform a ceremony and the lion goes away.  Guns do not work.“ )   “Man of Many Stories.”   Indeed, this lion was not acting as he ought to have.  By our scientific rules, he ought to have followed the scent trail, the drag of antelope viscera we had laid down leading to the trap and food. And perhaps he was headed toward food.   He remained on that beeline to the Land Rover Defender 110 where Harunnah and Dennis sat thirty feet to our left.  We made sure our Land Cruiser was buttoned down like a tank – just a gunner’s slit for the German’s Leica lens to peek out and film. Not so those other two in the Land Rover.  Not so the two Tanzanians. Ikanda cooler now than Denzel.  Window wide open, watching the big cat stride directly toward him.  The last rays of the sun touched them all, then bounced away for good.  Dennis and Harunnah and the man-eater were swallowed in a pure darkness.  Then, the strobe of Ikanda’s little Sony 4.8 mega pixel digital camera flared and bleached out the lion in a white light.  It was just feet from him as he sat at the wheel of the right-hand drive vehicle. “Oh, goddamn it Dennis,” Dairen Simpson, the American trapper, hissed and muttered under his breath from the front passenger seat in our vehicle.   Simpson had been described by a field zoologist friend as the best trapper in the world and the closest thing to Davy Crockett I’d see in the 21st century.  My friend was right.  Dairen stood six foot four and wore rustic clothes, a rakish leather hat and a long-mustached van dyke.  He spoke in a gentle drawl born of the American West and with a patience brought by four decades spent in such situations.   But Simpson and Dennis Ikanda were not getting along at the time.   It was an inevitable conflict, Ikanda the scientific observer of nature, clipboard and camera in hand.  Quantitative.  Simpson, the outdoorsman, a veritable force of nature, sensing it, not measuring it.    “Just take a goddamn pot and pan and beat it with a stick, Dennis,”  Simpson said as another flash froze the lion.  “Even a better way to chase him away.” But the lion stayed.  Another flare of white light. And another.  There was a disco strobe syncopation effect to the cat’s walk now.  It was at the front fender.  Another flash.  Then it crossed to the passenger side, rounded the other fender, (flash!) squared itself off with the passenger door (flash!),  and fixed its stare on Harrunah Lyimo,  just three meters away.   It sat back.  It stared some more.  It was a long way from our bait and the humane trap set up wind, where we wanted him. It was six feet away from Harunnah.    “Oh, goddamn it,” Simpson said. “Now the horny bastard has fallen in love with Harunnah.” Harunnah did not feel the love.   The lion lay down, front paws stretched out, head held alert, like the Sphinx, and affixed Harunnah with that direct dull stare of yellow eyes that seems both broad and piercing at one and the same time.    It terrified him.  And that was hard to do.  Harunnah Lyimo was just 28, but oozed IQ and confidence.  He was a zoologist, a scientist and had a great gift for bridging cultures. He was also bush smart.     I had seen him quarter the Hartebeest in 10 minutes flat when we first hung our baits.  Once, Harunnah had been drafted into the hunt for a famous man-eater so fierce that he had killed and eaten nearly 50 people.  Harunnah spent months tromping through the rains and on night-guard in the heart of man-eater country under constant threat of attack and death carrying two heavy rifles over his shoulder.  Yet it was at that moment right then in the Land Rover that he was most scared of a lion.  Slowly, he cranked the open window of the Land Rover closed.  And the window rocked in its cradle, rocked, then rattled and slipped down.  Less than ten feet away, the lion’s eyes bored through that space.  Dennis pointed his Sony at the lion and took another click.  Bleached in the flash, the lion flinched.   “Mmmm,” Harunnah said, in what I came to call the Tanzanian hum.   He was trying for words as to how to phrase it to Dennis Ikanda without being discourteous to his elder and fellow field researcher.  Ikanda was a very buttoned up, formal man, a scientist who required respect.  “Dennis, your window does not seem to roll up.” Ikanda nodded.  “The window sometimes slips and does not close.  Try it very slowly.” Harunnah rolled the window up again trying for purchase, like a safe cracker seeking the right combination.   The glass wobbled and rocked in its cradle and Harunnah stopped.  The lion continued to bore its stare through the open window.   Ikanda leaned over Harunnah in order to take another photo.  Harunnah held up his hand.  “Perhaps it would be good not to take another shot right now,” Harunnah said.  “The strobe seems to bother him and the window is down.” Ikanda said.  “Yes, perhaps you are right.” From our vehicle, Simpson hissed a whisper toward Ikanda 30 feet away.  “Dennis, he’s dumb as dirt, buddy, let’s dart him, what do you think?  Let’s dart him and forget about the trap.” Harunnah, with refined technique and held breath, cranked up the window ever so slowly and this time the pane locked in place.  Dennis whispered back to Dairen: “We could give it a try but if he heads into the bush, we will have to follow him.” The observation put a serious ding into Plan B. The pop of the dart-gun and the sting of the needle would almost certainly spook the young lion and we would have to give chase.   Lions feeding could be darted one-by-one, each thinking the prick of the dart came from an aggressive neighbor.  The snarls and chomps masked the pop of the dart gun. But here, the young male would know what hit him and almost certainly, he would run.   We did not know what was out there and it could be an entire pride. Elsewhere in Africa the lions might flee a pursuing Land Rover and we could safely give chase.   You could count on it in the Serengeti farther north, where the lions had learned from the Masai that humans meant sure death.  If a darted lion ran, you could find it with a degree of safety.  But this was not elsewhere and lions in southern Tanzania did not act like other lions when it came to humans.  Had not, Ikanda thought, since 2 AD, when the first slave caravans came through, leaving the sick and dead behind, in effect chumming for lion, teaching them new tricks and adding humans to the lion diet.  “I cannot prove it yet, but I sincerely believe that humans here have been natural prey for lions here for centuries,” he told me.  But you don’t have to go back that far.  Not two decades.  Not two years.  Not two months.   At least 70 Tanzanians are attacked and killed each year by lions.  Ikanda believes the unreported cases may double that number.  Some of this is attributed to bad luck and “opportunistic” kills by lions.  In other cases, an expanding population has pushed into lion territory and conflict is inevitable.  People often must travel at night to avoid the burning sun – and that brings them into contact with lions, which are nocturnal hunters.  The farmers also guard their crops at night – “human scarecrows,” so to speak – on watch against bush pigs.   The lions hunt the bush pigs, which are hard to catch, and find the humans, which are not.   Water is carried in 21 liter buckets and often is far away. And yes, older lions, lions with dental problems, sometimes take to eating humans because they were easier to catch.   But in other cases, it seemed undeniable that some perfectly healthy lion prides specialize in humans, seek them out, seize people from the front porches of mud huts in villages, tear through thatched roofs and loose mud walls.    The end of the lion named “Ossama,” said to have killed and eaten dozens. One lion in the Selous – he himself was nicknamed Ossama --  killed nearly 50 before a mob of villagers and a troop of Wildlife Department shooters peppered him with shot and shell in 2003.  Another, nicknamed Piece of Paper, killed more than 20 before a grieving widower allowed the government to poison the remains of his dead wife’s carcass.   The lion returned to feed, and died.  So Plan B – the darting – is put on hold. Simpson moves in an instant to Plan C.  When we called him in, the cat was supposed to go to the bait. Instead, it went to Harunnah.  But the cat did respond to the call of the loudspeakers – to the recordings of the dying animals and the feeding pride.   Harunnah keeps  his eyes always on the yellow slits of the lion – young, but easily 350 pounds and in his prime.   The guide’s breath fogs the window as he exhales.  But he can hear Dairen whisper to Dennis, whose window is still open: “Listen,  Dennis,” Simpson says.  “Take the Defender and go to the bait.  Go to the bait, buddy.  Then make the calls.  Set up and make the calls again.  He’ll follow you.  He’ll come to the calls and see the bait.” If the two men do not communicate well on this trip, tonight is the exception.  They both get it instantly.  Tonight they are synched.  Brethren of the bush. Ikanda nods and starts the Defender.  They motor quietly the hundred or so yards to the trap.   Harunnah is relieved as they leave the lion.  This is as close as ever he wanted to be to a man-eater at night.  (Then again, his night is not over.) The shunned lion watches the landie leave, waits for a moment, glances at us, takes one long last lingering look at Harunnah disappearing, looks at us again, sees nothing worth sticking around for, and seems for a moment for all the world as if he were jilted at the prom.   Then the poor chump heads for the bush.  Stood up, broken-hearted again. “Come on Dennis, come on Harunnah, fire up the speakers guys, come on, buddies, he’s getting away,” Simpson says to himself aloud.  At the bait site, Harunnah and Ikanda have piled out of the Defender and are frantically re-rigging the sound system.  They do this not knowing whether the lion has stayed with us and the Land Cruiser more than 100 yards away -- or has tagged along directly on their heels.  They cannot see much in the dark; we do not have radios.  They are exposed atop the Defender and on the ground. Meanwhile, the young lion has stayed with us.  He is not getting away.  He is gone. We see his tail start to disappear in deep bush, and Simpson says, “Godammit, goddammit, he’s getting away.  Not going to happen. Not going to happen. “Roll down the window, roll down the window, I’m going to call him back.” We all feel a little embarrassed now.  Davy Crockett is overplaying his hand.  It is the first time I get the feeling that my countryman is pushing his personal legend too far.     My antennae pick it up and my sensors send the bullshit needle way over into the red.  He cups his hands to his mouth and out comes a lion roar and cough. “Arrr..rrrrrr…ughhhh. Arrr….rrrrr….ughhh.”The Germans and I look at each other.  Michael, the director, Sascha, the cameraman, Ellen, the sound tech.  Simpson and Ikanda It’s, uh, pretty hard to distinguish Simpson’s call from Ikanda’s tape of feeding lions.  We had been prepared to grimace; even laugh.  Now all four Westerners wrinkle our brows in anticipation. Pwagu just smiles broadly. The cat stops.  “Arrr..rrrrrr…ughhhh. Arrr….rrrrr….ughhh….ughhh….ughh….” Turns in its own tracks.  Comes back.  Pwagu smiles in appreciation. Simpson has brought him around. (“Mein gott,” Ellen says later.  “if that lion knew who had called him, he could not face his children.”) “Come on Harunnah, come on buddy. Come on, now, let’s hear it now, let’s hear it,” Simpson says.  We take up the incantation silently in our heads in the backseat. Bush prayers to the lion gods, summoning our own mizaranga. From afar, from the direction of the trap:  A shriek of electronic distortion and feedback, a tortured electric Hendrix-like axe that flares up in a wail to kiss the sky then crashes down, down before Dennis can adjust the knobs.  The acoustic screech turns to static then gives way to the sweeter sounds of lion roars and the melodious screams and death throes of a wildebeest.  Welcome noises.  Or so they seem to us. Ikunda and Harunnah have fired up the sound.  Done it. Jumped back to the Defender, doors closed now. Harunnah’s window sealed tight, thanks much. The young male hears the roars. Snaps to on the sound.  And as if scripted, he heads to the bait tree and the Defender.   In the Land Cruiser, we can only wait and hope it all works…that the cat comes and sniffs out the little bait we have left and follows Dairen’s clever path that will lead the lion to place a front foot into a humane snare that will hold him but not harm him.  We hope it works.  Even if it does not, the expedition will build awareness of the problem, we think.   And that is why we are here.  The expedition may not provide an answer, but it frames out the question.  And later, when we do not succeed, we know at least we have limned the problem for all to see. And that is major.   Stating the question is radical.  For if scientists can’t come up with a replacement word for “man-eater,” they also are having trouble even asking why man-eating behavior is increasing.  They have trouble in fact just stating that it is.  For the topic is not just taboo among villagers, it is taboo among most zoologists and field biologists and good green conservationists and preservationists like me.  Few study the problem.   The exceptions are Ikanda and a mentor, Dr. Craig Packer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who is widely considered the best “lion man” in the field today.  It is a brave endeavor, if you value research credentials.  Rolf Baldus, a German economist, made it his cause in the early 2000, suggested that the Wildlife Department was corrupt and in the pocket of trophy hunter concessions – and promptly found that the Tanzanian government had revoked all his research permits after a lifetime of work. “The pressure to spend public development budgets coupled with the obvious lack of Governance improvement and at the same time persisting hopes and illusions on the side of the donors reward those in Africa who benefit from bad Governance and punishes those who want to reform,” Baldus wrote. “Bad Governance – or should I better say corruption - pays after all!”   Craig Packer in the field. In 2006, Packer and Ikanda wrote a short piece in the scientific journal Nature.  The article in a sense diplomatically but clearly lay down a challenge to conservationists.  Man-eating was on the increase in some areas and it needed to be studied and mitigated.  This was needed in part because the conservation policies fostered by Western interests and science were in fact resulting in the deaths of more and villagers.  Man-eating had increased five-fold in ten years, by one study. The Packer Ikanda findings are brilliant.  But also a proposition popular with almost no one.  It’s beyond an inconvenient truth.  It’s the inconvenient turd in the conservation movement’s punch bowl.  Green preservationists  are prone to sense it as a danger to the lions.  People will use the report as an excuse to clear out lions.   Hunters too are suspicious.  Lion hunting is a big deal in Tanzania and in many ways a godsend to wildlife and habitat preservation, but the hunting concession fears it may lead to lion control efforts and fewer lions for them to guide wealthy westerners toward.   Packer has suggested that hunting could be the savior of the lions but the hunting lobby opposes his suggestions that only older lions be shot.  Even the villagers, though glad to see us, are very unclear as to why we want to trap a man-eater, put a collar on it and…release it.  We tell them we are here to trap man-eaters because the man-eaters are too clever to be darted.  They smile approvingly.  We tell them we will dart the lions – more smiles.   Then we tell them we will put a GPS collar on the lion and let it go.   The faces move from a smile to an expression of befuddlement to one of contempt, anger, pity, or incredulity.   The whole collar thing seems another Western con. Conservation is embraced here when it provides an economic benefit through tourism or hunting.  But to many villagers, the protection of wildlife means something quite the opposite.  It was not just the one  man-eater that was nicknamed Ossamma here.  At a much more practical level, “Ossama” can be a generic name for all man-eating lions – even other animals and wildlife that threaten the villagers or their livelihood.      Elephants were known by that name, if they raided crops and killed human defenders of the fields.  Certain crocodiles had been named “Ossama” as well.    Even more cuddly wildlife, like monkeys, in a sense could be categorized broadly as Ossamas.  They could strip a field of corn just as thoroughly as a herd of elephants and leave villagers in the mud hut regions destitute and starving.  When that happens, a mother in the Lindi area of Tanzania described what happens. “In December and January, there is no money and no food.  You put a pot on and let it boil.  You let it boil until the children grow tired of waiting for dinner and fall asleep.” The term Ossama had nothing to do with politics or religion and everything to do with an analogy to terrorism.  Westerners on safari and the Discovery Channel saw noble animals living idyllic lives in nature.  The locals, who lost relatives, crops and income to the wildlife, often saw them as the zoological equivalent of enemies – as guerilla franchises protected by law.    We did not understand that completely then, but we did know the lions would not win this game even in the mid term.  Neither would the elephants and the others.  Short term, the lions won.  Humans were slow moving and vulnerable.  Machetes were heavy weaponry here.  There were fewer guns and fewer cartridges.  The average human lifespan was about 45 years.   The annual income:  about $400 per year.  Long term?  Blowback was broad and brutal and once a tipping point was reached when too many humans had been killed and too many crops pillaged, humans always prevailed through poison, fences or automatic weapons.   It was a repeated cycle in Africa and Tanzanians differed from other Africans and our Western forebears only in their patience.   It was the last, best place for wildlife in Africa.  Animals were free to roam outside parks and reserves by law and were protected unless clearly endangering life.    “Say anything you want about Tanzania,” said Packer.  “But so far as environmental policy is concerned, there is Tanzania and then there is everywhere else.  No one has as an enlightened a philosophy.” But the philosophy was being tested and we knew that a biological clock was ticking down for the blowback to occur in some parts of Tanzania.     This had happened before, in the 1940’s in Ngombe where famed game warden George Rushby had hunted down a pride that had killed more than 1,000 people – still considered the “All Africa” record for man-eating by most experts.  And it had happened in the 1980’s when lions raided deep into a city of 20,000 named Tunduru on the Mozambique border.  Ikanda had documented a story that was beyond strange. A task force leader was dispatched from the central government and calmed the city leaders, and the lion situation seemed under control for the moment  back then.   Then the task force leader left around 9 pm for a late night dinner.  A lion ambushed him in the center of town and they found only man’s hand and wrist with watch attached the next morning.  The city was panicked by that time and – as might be understood.   The army swept the area, and strafed lions unmercifully in a twenty mile region.  More than twenty were killed.   Those were extremes.  The lion holocausts could happen less dramatically, too.  Twenty cents of the right fertilizer laced into a goat carcass can kill a pride.  A dime’s worth of thin wire makes a lethal snare.  Once humans have had enough, they are very effective in destroying lions.   And in fact, except where they were protected within park boundaries such as South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Tanzania was the last outpost of free-range lions in Africa.  Which is one reason Harunnah and Dennis and all of us were there.  We wanted the collars on this lion so we could find out what his habits were and those of his pride and the information might allow the free range lions and the villagers to live more peacefully.  It was a sophisticated upscale version of the mice belling the housecat “If we know where they travel and what they do, we may be able to determine what makes them attack humans and stop it,” Ikanda said. --------- So on the night of the maneless man-eater, this is why the men had scrambled at the trap site in the Selous.  This is why they risked their lives in the dark not knowing what might leap from it.  They had fired up the lion calls and wildebeest squeals and waited. Then, through the darkness, emerging again, came the young male lion.  Ripped with muscles,  the young male owned the patch of ground in a moment through sheer body language. This time there was no mooning at Harunnah.   There were no strobes from Ikanda’s camera. The cat caught the smell of the bait and sniffed about, its thoughts on food and a full stomach, we hoped.  At a sitting, lions can gorge on more than 50 pounds of meat at a time. He is finding less tempting amounts here, though – and there’s the rub.   There’s not fifty pounds of anything, except brush and wood fibers.  The hyenas hit our traps the first night  -- as they always do – and left a small piece of hartebeest jawbone and skull behind.   This was expected.  Simpson knows the drill.  The hyenas wise up on the first night, Simpson sets new traps with new bait the next night and he snares the lions on the second and third nights.       But we have no new bait.  Just scraps and the hartebeest skull left from four trap sets.  Leftovers, and not much of that.  On the second night,  we could set only one snare – and barely that.  We had gathered all available bits of meat and gristle from all the trap sites and packed this pastiche into the skull and wired it high on a tree above the snare.  Go with what you’ve got! Harunnah and Dairen rig up the hartebeest skull.   The hartebeest bait from the WD lasted just one night.  This is what we hope now will lure in the young male.  He settles down on the ground in front of the trap and plays with the piece of jawbone for a moment.  Then he heads toward the trap and the skull.  Harunnah and Ikanda are riveted.  Tensed.  Staring through the windshield. They are willing the lion forward. He stares at the horns of the hartebeest, the skull and packed in bits of meat and gristle, and sniffs in its direction.  The tree looks like a badly done heavy metal album cover with the satanic skull peering back at the lion. -----   Then something upsets the animal.  Dennis and Harunnah can see this but  do not know what causes it.  Perhaps it is no food on top of no love. He bats at the thorn bushes surrounding the trap, then runs about to its back door, to the thorn bushes and branches we have cut earlier to keep him from approaching from behind.  We can hear the ruckus of shifting brush back in our Toyota more one hundred yards away. “That’s struggle,” Simpson says. “That’s good. That’s sound of a struggle.  We nailed him.” But it was not the case.  “He was angry about something, perhaps scared,”  Ikanda would say later.  “He was a very brave young cat, actually, to rush to those sounds and protect his turf.  At the trap, he was upset and took it out at the bushes.”   Simpson builds a set.  The lion recovers from his hissy fit and returns to the front of the trap.    He stares at the hartebeest skull.  There is still a chance.   He may go in.  He needs to be left alone without distraction.  As quietly as they can, Dennis and Harunnah start the Defender and leave the lion there.  They drive back toward us, hoping that the lion will calm down and feed.  Over the savannah, in the pitch black, we see the low running lights of the Defender driving.   They pull alongside.  Ikanda pops out and so does Simpson.  They meet between the vehicles and agree we might still have a shot if we leave the lion alone.     We’ll let the lion circle the trap and hope he comes to it some time during the night, and then collect him in the morning.  We might still get him.   It’s usually how it works, Simpson says.  We’re packing it up and packing it in for the night now. Harunnah is busily dismantling the speakers on top of the Defender but always, as he is prone to do, looking from his working hands, out to the bush, down to his hands, out to the bush.   Simpson needs a bigger chunk of meet to lure in the lions?  Well, he has it.  He are it. “Lion!” Harunnah hisses.  Our head snaps to our rear --- “Always they come from the rear, I think,” Ellen had said – and there is our ghastly buddy.  He emerges from the black and white of night, close enough so that color comes to his figure. He is striding directly toward Simpson and Ikanda, who are on the ground outside the cars.   He is lit by our running lights – an odd color of tawny yellow striped by red Defender taillights.   Both men have their differences, but share a similar cool now.   They are just feet from the doors of their respective vehicles.    Earlier, Simpson and Harunnah set the trap site.     Slowly – no running here that would trigger an attack – they edge to the doors, slowly open them, and as if synchronized swimmers, slip into their vehicles at the same time with the same movements.  Harunnah crouches on the top of the Defender frozen behind the big speakers and is now even more exposed – outside the vehicle – just one leap away from the lovelorn lion. Our friend does not pause.  Just walks off into the swampy area.  Harunnah hops down on the far side of the Land Rover and is in the door in a flash.  All are safe.   “He was quite brave, really,” Ikanda said again.  “To come forward like that all alone to face the sounds of a whole pride of lionesses.  I think he was in defense and protection mode…territorial.” “Or damned horny,” Simpson adds.  “Or lonely.” Those remarks signal the end of the brief Ikanda-Simpson synchronicity and are   emblematic of their conflict.   But neither point of view helps us now; neither side seems to have an answer. “Goddammit, we need bait,” Simpson says.  “We’re never going to catch lions unless we get some real bait.” We’ve got a big nothing.  Again.  We just plain are not lucky, it seems, and the chance of a successful belling of any cat is unlikely. ------ “Not lucky.”  In the west, we would call it luck.  Or blame it all on gremlins.  Neutrally, we would call it bureaucracy.  A faceless force that thwarts. Here it is mizaranga.  And from all that I have studied, it would be hard for me to say that magic has not played a profound role in the success or failure of pursuing man-eaters.   Even the fiercest westerners who have chased after them have felt that same prickly feeling – that the magic is not just a superstition.  Or if it is, the superstition is so prevalent that it impacts both villagers and westerners to such a degree that it should be considered a reality.  I don’t believe in ghost lions.  But perception matters.   Believe that.   I do. Dial  time back 70 years and a famous professional hunter and game warden named George Rushby was tracking man-eaters.  For nearly five years in Ngumbe, Tanganyika – now Tanzania – Rushby chased a pride of lions that to this day is seen by many as holding the “All Africa” record for man-eating.   For more than ten years, the pride and its descendents ravaged the villages of the district northwest of what is now the Selous, killing more than 1,500 men, women and children in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The toll may have actually exceeded 2000 by some counts.  Rushby would bring down his best African game rangers, fearless men who had faced down lions dozens of times, all to no avail.  They were baffled.  The local villagers were of no help and even feared the rangers’ efforts would bring greater retribution.  They had tried, they told the rangers, but had tracked the lion’s pug marks only to see them change into those of a human.               The villagers all knew why the lions could not be caught or killed.  They were spirit lions, they said, bewitched and kept in a herd and groomed by a village official who had been deposed.  He was using the lions against the villagers until he was reinstated.  The former official had bewitched the lions themselves, most said, but others believed it was even worse.   Lycanthropy – the ability of a human to change into animal shape -- was at play.   These were the lion equivalents of were wolves – men and women who were changed into lions to do the ex-official’s bidding.  Villagers walking in deep bush to get water is a common scene.     The villagers would not speak of the man-eaters if possible, because no one ever knew for certain who might be a spirit lion in human form -- a were lion.   Husbands would not mention the spirit lions to their wives, nor wives to their husbands for this very reason.  They suspected the other might be a supernatural beast.  No one knew who the were lions were or who might be offended by the mere mention of the killings.                So the villagers were of no help; in fact, they were a hindrance.  The social bonding of humans against predators – a major advantage to the survival of ours species – was lost.  Some even harassed the hunters, fearing the spirit lions would be angered by the rangers' presence.   The villagers spooked Rushby's rangers -- and even Rushby himself.   Rushby believed that lions – like us – are just big bags of blood that bullets could burst.  The logic of bullets trumped magical lions any day in his book of spells, and eventually Rushy’s bullets did beat the lions and proved that they were mortal.  To him at least.    But in Africa, any attempt to apply western explanations to the problems of the “spirit ions” are countered by another that includes mizaranga, the magic of the invisible world. ==== Call it what you want.  If you see the Invisible Hand of supply and demand as mizaranga, then the villagers and I are on the same page.  Our bait, supposed to be supplied by the Tanzanian Wildlife Department in one of the most game rich areas in the world, suddenly became unattainable.  As did any livestock we might purchase “You don’t catch a lion with a hartebeest skull,” Simpson kept saying.   “That’s leopard bait at best.  Even a goat is too small. “ Day after day, we go to village to village to buy anything we can or to convince the Wildlife Department to shoot another antelope for us.  Ah, we are fresh out of bullets, the Wildlife Department tells us.   We offer to buy some.  We reach out to find cartridges for guns the Wildlife Department says could be used -- if only they had cartridges.  They did not.  It was a poor country.  We could understand, please. It took us awhile to understand.  That we were the chumps.  We were well-meaning and a bit slow.  It was the Invisible Hand at play, along with a bit of sleight of hand,.  There were bullets and bait out there.  Just not for us.   -------- That realization came only later.   Right now, we were impatient to find ammo in the Selous because of the things we had seen farther south in Lindi.    There, two weeks earlier, the  human element of the tragedy here became all too real all too soon.  I had written an earlier book on the increase in man-eating in 2006, but what I knew of the impact on humans was largely second hand and abstract. Data. The on-the-ground encounter with “the data” struck me full force before we started the trapping.  It hit me shortly after   I hit the ground in Lindi Province, ground zero for the lion-human conflict in Tanzania, a few weeks before the trapping began, many miles south from the Selous, on the northern border of Mozambique.  In Lindi City, at the start of the expedition.  Michael, the author, Harunnah, Sascha. Some deaths are different than others.  That’s not a statistical fact.  It is a by-god emotional truth. ----- First village. Lindi Province.  Down South.  The sweet village of Simana.  First day out.  I am unprepared for this.  Not some horror, not at first.  I am unprepared for the wonders of the bush that I did not expect.   The village kids.  The ‘data.”  They swarm us when we stop.  Follow us where we walk.  All pure curiosity, love and openness.  There follow the pleas for money, treats, pens, even empty bottles – choupas.  Of course. It is Africa.     Villagers here have been looking for something from us for centuries.  Empty bottles and spare change are not the worst things we have given them. But in the village of Simana in Lindi Province, even the begging is sweet and short.   The smart young girls in the school – blue skirts; white blouses -- want only information and intellectual interplay.  Sharifa, a leader, cuts off the begging with a sharp, “No” and gesture across her throat.   She and her friends cluster around me to teach me to count in Swahili.  They ask me about my western nose.   Squeal when I touch it and say, “big nose.”  They collapse and tumble over each other when I say my name is “Bob.”  “Bob!” they say back to me making both ‘b’s pop, with their eyes bulged.  My name suddenly has become a frog-like sound – a noise of the African night.  They plea to have their picture taken, then shriek in joy at the digital image.     They are every bit as much a miracle of the bush as the zebras, gazelles, leopards, buffalo and elephants that had enchanted me when first I came to Africa.  Every bit and more. Too long in the village and the picture of wonder bleeds into a sense of horror.  The girls and women wear beautiful prints and dress traditionally.  The boys and men, many of them, wear Islamic caps – vibaharashia – but also  western t-shirts, some new from America – “Phat Pharm” -- and many more hand-me downs.  “Taxes Rangers” says one – clearly a print shop botch job.  “Lakers” is popular.  “Baseball Cardinals” says another.  “Avalon, N.J.,” proclaims yet one more.  On the fringe, I see one man, older, far at the edge of the crowd, three kids in tow.  He wears a T-shirt, so worn, torn and thread-bare it is barely clothing.   One less woof, one less warp and it will fall to pieces. Still you can read the American branding: “Have Mercy!  GLT Gives me the Blues. 89.9 103.5 Normal FM Peoria.”    Blue is how he seems.  He turns away from me and the bright young girls.  Fades. Leaves us.  A wraith.  So thin he seems just to turn sideways and disappear. One boy too holds back from the crowd, at another time.  Hannah Hassan Chosi, aged ten, with just a stub of a left arm above the elbow, hangs far, far back, next to his uncle who is constantly with him, it seems.    Later, I find them both.   The Give me the Blues guy is Seleman Said Naugonmba, now 52, father of six.  He lives on the outskirts of Simana, though this is not a correlative with lion attacks anymore.  He might have been dead center in the village and this can still happen.   Late afternoon, February 5, 2003, the rainy season, but clear this day.  His 10 year old child and his wife are in the stockade “back-yard” of their square mud-hut, when a large maneless male lion clears the tall stick fence in a graceful bound from the back, leaps into the yard, stops, looks, sizes things then seizes the woman by the neck, then effortlessly flips her over his shoulder and clears the stockade again, this time headed toward the front yard and the bush. The ten year old thinks it a game, the animal playing with his mother, but Seleman’s older son sees this from inside the hut and yells to his father. “ Lion. Lion!  The lion has chosen the mommy! “ Seleman looks out in time to see the cat disappear with his wife down a game trail, grabs his machete and yells, “help, help, help,” gives chase.   Neighbors swarm from their own huts, machetes at the ready, they yell, tear down the game trail. Too much for the lion and he drops her.  Far too late.   Her neck is opened and she is dead.  The family, the children, the villagers, look at the body.   They do not give chase to the lion.  That would be useless.  Game rangers are called, but it is days before they can give chase. Today, Seleman tells his story surrounded by his children. None manage that well even years later.  “I see the tracks of lions now and I am afraid for the babies.”  The children seem distracted. Traumatized.  Michael, the director of the documentary, asks them to busy themselves doing a typical chore – washing dishes in a 21-litre bucket.  A little guy stands in front of the empty bucket, clueless.   They make believe they are washing.   The kid is befuddled and stiffly self-aware. “No water,” Michael says.  It is not remotely authentic.  Michael does not shoot fake film.  And he wants to help the kid.  The little guy is so helpless.  “Harrrooonaaahhh. Harunnah.  Please, give him water.  We will replace it, yah.” With water, the little guy scrubs away like mad.  He scrubs, scrubs, scrubs. Is comforted.  It’s good footage.  It’s real.  Sascha films them, then cannot stand it anymore.  He is a kind man, in his 50’s, warm to all.  Father Christmas.   He stops his camera, moves to one little fellow, shakes his hand, jokes with him, tries for a smile.  We have learned that Sascha can fix anything.  Distributors. Batteries. Lights. Generators. Kerosene stoves.  Lion sound calling systems.  All of these things he has fixed.  Sascha cannot fix this.   Sascha ------ Outside Simana, in a remote part of the bush, December 14, 2001, the rainy season,  and Hannah, the ten year-old now with one arm, was sleeping in a house with walls of bark.  He was five years old then and had both arms, of course. He lived with his uncle  Salum Muhammed Salum who grew corn and other subsistence crops.  Farmers must rotate their homes every few seasons because the soil is so poor it must be rested. Hence, the remote location.  Hannah sleeps near the wall of the hut and awakes screaming, not knowing why.  Something forceful has clamped his arm and drags him through the wall.   Or tries. The lion is sticking its head through a crack in the bark hut.  It lifts Hannah’s whole body and slams it again against the fragile wall.   It holds. Hannah screams again and Salum comes running, finds his nephew jammed against the wall, pulls him back, sees him slammed back against the wall again with incredible force. A tug of war ensues.  The lion pulls with great force, its jaws a vice.  Hannah is screaming, screaming, and Salum pulls with all his might. It ends.  Sickeningly.   Hannah’s arm simply slips away bone and all above the elbow just below his shoulder like a wing from a roast chicken.  The lion runs with this small morsel. But it may not be over.  The uncle knows lions and how bold they are here.   They have no neighbors.  Others, children and adults, live in the small hut.    He ties a tourniquet on the arm of Hannah but the boy wails and screams with the pain.   Salum Muhammed Salum says to his nephew, “ Please Hannah, please, you must be quiet, please be quiet.  If you are not quiet, the lion will return and eat the other children and the mommies.   I know you hurt, but please be quiet and save our lives.  Save our lives, please.”   Hannah, near a house similar to his the night the lion came. Hannah stays quiet.  His whole arm, gone, five years old, and he sucks it up and tamps it down.  The lions are outside.  They can hear them.  But they do not come in.   His uncle bicycles him to medical help 15 miles away the next morning.  Both nephew and uncle believe they still see the track of this particular lion and the fears still come to them.  They abandon their old farm and move to the village, but lion tracks they see even there and think them to be the same lion.  And that night of clear, sheer, horror. ---- In the back yard of the house where the lion chose the mommy, Harunnah and I meet with 30 kids gathered around us .  All have peered in through the poles of the stockade, looking inside, wanting inside.  All week, the kids have peered in, wanted in.  We invite them in. Harunnah motions to them to come forward.  They scuttle forward fast together as if a single multi-legged organism, sorted by size, smallest in front.   We are surrounded and pressed in by a delightful crowd of beautiful friendly faces, most about waist high to us in the front row, running to the taller kids in the rear.  The closest lean into us and look up. Mmmm. How do you feel about lions?  Harunnah asks them this.  What do you know about lions? One girl of about 12 – one of the smart girls – speaks up.  “I know that lions eat dogs, they eat goats,” she says. Then she adds ever so slowly and sadly in a voice that trails off in a minor chord.  “And they eat people……” There is a longer pause and then she adds: “I am afraid of them.” “Mmmm,” says the small crowd. Said a boy of bite-sized height near her: “They should all be killed.  I am very afraid of lions and want them dead.”  “Mmmm,” the small crowd of small people said. --- That day rattles me.   To the core.  I am a grizzled old journalist and I have seen things.  Riots.  Gunfire. The dead.  Disfigured beggars in India.  The worst  slums in my country and in the world.  I have walked by more than one dead body without looking down. Here, it is different. And this is worse some how, though the poverty is not, I think.  Why? Because here there is pure horror.  Here some deaths are different than others.   I see the faces on the data now, and that is emotionally moving, of course, but there is something else that sticks in my head like an obscene song lyric, a sailor’s dirty ditty.   I cannot clear it, it seems.  It loops back into my psyche.  I’ve studied a lot about man-eaters in recent years.  There is a nutritional math involved.  And it is this that runs through my head. Lions need 100 pounds of meat a week to stay healthy and active.   Schaller’s studies in the 1970’s.  A human being – dressed out so to speak – provides about 50 pounds.  Gnoske and Peterhans, 2002.  So a child, a kid, a young girl like Sharifa, could not provide more than --  and the math turns dreadful.  I stop. Catch myself.  Two minutes later, it cycles back like the bad lyrics.  Sharifa. Smiling. The awful math.  I will myself to stop. It comes back, like a sick version of the song, “It’s a Small World After All.”  We have dropped off Hannah and his uncle in the village and are headed back to Lindi City.  Ali, Harunnah and I are in the front seat as we move through rough bush and roads that are nearly as rough as the bush.   The Germans are in the back.  The stockade fence where the lion took the mommie. I doze. I dream.  Here are the sounds and sights of my dream.   Harrrooooonaahhhh. The German crew is calling for our guide.   Sharifa. Onnnne.  Twooooo.  Threeee.  The kids fill my car window in the dream, count in English for me.  Choupas. Choooooooooopaaaaaa!  The kids.  Give me 500.  Give me your watch.  Give me your pen.  The tall grass. The feel of Hannah’s stump in my ribs when we road in the landie. The bump of the Land Rover. Harrooooonahhhh. Grim rictus of a lion victim picture I saw in South Africa.  Sharifa.  Harooooonahhh.  Something else. Horrible.  Unbearable. I awake in a start at the horrible point and the Germans laugh.  They tell me Harunnah and I both have been sleeping, exhausted, jammed together in the front seat.  Our heads fall synchronized on each other’s shoulder.  Left to right, left to right, back and forward, back and forward, like marionettes controlled by the same strings of sleep.  Bobble-head Bob.  The “data.” Then the last image of the dream flickers in my consciousness, that last dream-memory that can nearly be lost if one does not grasp it and restate it in one’s head   It was the terrible force of a lion clamping down on me as I sleep. A terrible force. Irresistible.  A terrible clamping vice. The dream would recur, all through Lindi.  The lion would clamp down on me.  Then release.  Then clamp down on Sharifa.  On Hannah.  The lion took them. I was free of the lion.  And I was as helpless watching them as I had been in the grip of the lion.  Some force still held me in the same vise as the lion’s jaw and I could not move to help them. I parked my first world guilt in Asia decades ago.  You had to in order to function there.  So what was it that I felt now?  “Have Mercy!  GLT Gives me the Blues. Indeed. Blues most primal.  Blues for the species, I think. Blues for the eaten. Blues for the lions too.   But true blues first and foremost – for the first time -- for the lion-dead data.  Not guilt, but a blend of horror and helplessness.  We return to Lindi City late that night.  They will not let us stay in the village out of fear of lion attack, though we want to.  At the Himo One restaurant, we run in to the District Wildlife Manager . He is Oscar Lipik, young, college educated, smart, with English as good or better than mine.  (“’Matrilineal” is the phrase you may be searching for,” he told me when I was asking earlier if uncles often raised their sister’s sons here.) “How did you enjoy your visit to the lost people?” he asked, with a smile. “Pardon me.  What did you say?” I spoke a bit sharply.  I was taken aback and thought his smile meant he found the villagers amusing or pathetic.  In fact, he had read my pursed-face look like a book – probably had had the same experience.   He leaned in closer to me so I could see that he did not intend to belittle the villagers.  Or me. “Did you not see how they were lost?” he said. “I believe you saw how lost they are.  I think I see that you saw that.”  The smile was one of sympathy – of empathy -- and it told me he knew I had.  He nodded his head yes. “Yes, ” I said.  “The lions too.” “Yes, yes, the lions, too,” he said. “But the people are lost.  You saw that.  People in the West do not know that, you see.” I nodded yes to him, could say nothing else and averted my eyes.   Then changed the discussion to matrilineal cultures. ------ Arrayed against lion attacks are scant resources.  If your vision of Africa is an AK-47 cradled in the hands of every ten year old, think again.  Here guns are scarce.  And shells and cartridges scarcer still.  Here in Lindi there is mostly just Gaspar Msese. a stone cold killer, I thought at first. He is Assistant District Manger of Wildlife in Lindi.  Some thought him a bully.  For certain, he was bush smart and cut a strong figure of a man.  At first, he seemed to me to be Harunnah’s dark opposite.   He was near twice Harunnah’s size – well over 200 pounds.  Msese and I did not seem prone to like each other. Msese, the true outdoorsman here, the killer of man-eating lions, wore slick black loafers propped up on a chair in a rough bar, bottle of Safari beer in hand, toothpick to teeth.  His pants were creased dress black slacks, and he donned a bright dark purple long-sleeved colored shirt that popped out from his dark brown skin like neon paint on black velvet.    His eyes bore blood-shot veins and across an otherwise perfect set of white teeth ran a thin horizontal layer of caramel-corn colored stain.  Always, it seemed, he was assessing, assessing.  Working that toothpick.  Assessing. He took a look at me then, gave me and my Western bush clothes an appraisal and then laughed quietly, in an amused and cynical manner, not quite to himself.   I almost certainly looked like Monsieur Le Safari Dude. “Eeeee-heh, heh, heh,” was the way his laugh sounded.  Mr. Msese had little English, but the soundtrack of the laugh, with its various inflections, communicated all that needed to be said.    But we warmed to each other.  If no one mistook Msese for an intellectual, everyone could see he was smart.  He thought a lot. Always assessing.  Always measuring.  Then moving.  And he cleared our way.  Quick out of the car whenever we hit a village, Msese was all action, opportunism with an odd kindness thrown in that at first did not compute and confused me.  He would score a ripe papaya from a low-hanging village tree, then kindly slip some pants back on to a naked young fellow before the camera crew panned his way, slap the child gently on the butt, then eye and smile at a pretty young woman lustfully, cackle a laugh, then help a village elder find a seat in the shade and nod respectfully back to the young woman who then smiled back at him. First, though and always, he was all business and demanding of respect.  Body language bristling and controlling, mature, in his mid-30’s, strong as the water buffalo symbol of his regional game ranger service, he often would leave our landie as we approached a mud hut village, hack off a six foot branch from an acacia and then peel it barkless with his big knife.  This staff was power, and he wielded it when kids swarmed over us or overran the German documentary crew that was filming.  He stamped it on the ground and yelled out in Swahili: “Hey.  Everyone behave here.  You behave or see me!”  And he would lift the stick up half-high and make a hammering motion with it.  Mr. Msese, far right, guides the Lindi expedition. (Author center.)     If Harunnah was the interpreter of cultures, the bridge-builder, then Msese could be the enforcer, the brute authority that set order and allowed a disciplined space for thoughts to occur. And he protected the people with courage beyond whatever I could summon. A plague of lion attacks on humans has hit the village of Negara in Lindi Province to the south.  December 2004.  The rainy season. As usual, word of the man-eating reaches Msese in Lindi City hours away, very late.  Fifteen hours late.  Someone must report the attack to the village officials.  The village officials must dispatch a message to Msese.  If lucky, the message comes by car or motorcycle – more likely bicycle. Then Msese waits.  Must wait.  For approval of a Land Rover, for requisitions of ammunition.   Then he seeks approval to use the big pump multi-shot  shotgun.  Then waits for that. Fills out forms.  Waits. (“Why not a rifle?” I asked him.  “No good, no good,” he said in the English he knew and then said, “Lion goes….” and with one hand made a sweeping, serpentine movement that zigged, zagged, then lead right to his throat.  “Shot gun,” he said then, and held a fake gun to his shoulder. “Boom!” and with his hands showed how the pellets from the shotgun covered a large area.  “Pump” I asked. “Pump!” he said, levering the imaginary rack of a pump shotgun.  “Boom, boom, boom, boom.  Is best.”) Two days late and many dollars short, in his Tanzanian Wildlife Department uniform of olive drab, one epaulette dangling, and the jaunty burgundy beret with the Cape Buffalo logo, Msese sets out finally in a rented Land Rover on a cold trail in Lindi Province.  In the interim, the lions kill four more villagers. He is smart.  He accepts the blessing of a local healer.  “Yes, it slows me down,” he tells me through Harunnah.  “But if I did not take the time to have the blessing, then the villagers would say that the reason I did not get the lion was that I refused the blessing and could not see the spirit lion and then they would not help me or respect me.” Perhaps it is the blessing. Or he just gets “Western”  lucky.  They pick up fresh tracks that match those of the killer pride.  He gets unlucky.  The tracks lead into head-high tall grass.  This, the wet season. Thick grass. Lion grass. He gets lucky again.  The villagers are fed up. Eleven of them volunteer to help him and with machetes head into the tall grass, hacking, hacking, shouting, shouting, “Simba! Simba! Simba!”   None of this du-du stuff. Mortal lions.  They will drive the mortal lions from the tall grass, kill them in the clear.  That is the plan. The hope.    Lions in the tall grass… Msese on point in the middle.  Pump ready.  No field of vision.  Grass taller even than he is. It goes all very wrong.  The lions don’t scare.  Don’t even care.  They are not driven.  They are not afraid of humans.  None of them got the memo, understood the plan.  Have their own plan, in fact. Three lay in ambush in the tall grass.  At 45 meters, all three lions charge.   “Amboozhus,” Msese says, running the words together, then getting it right.  “Ambush us.” Lions cover 45 meters in about the time you can read a sentence that says, “Lions covers 45 meters in the time it takes you to read this sentence.” Grunts and coughs from the lions and then fast moving waves in the grass.  The men with the machetes know they are coming.  See the grass take a lion form and then disappear.  Du-dus now, not lions.  Not simba.  Real lions in lion grass seem like ghosts.  Like du-dus.   The villager’s hack at the grass, at the lions, at what they think are lions, as the big cats stride to breach the human wall.   Msese thinks to cover them all.  Knows he cannot.  Makes his choice.  Picks one lion.   The lion picks him.  He fires, pumps, fires, pumps. The lion weaves, swerves, is of the grass, just moving grass, has marked his man, is coming for Msese.  Du-du, pest of the forest, insect of the bush.  Not simba.  One of the Ossamas. Grass seven feet tall.  Waves in the grass. Four hundreds pound at 30 miles per hour.  Moving toward him. Msese believes in gunpowder, not ghosts. He fires, racks the pump, fires, pumps, fires, pumps, fires, pumps, fires, pumps.  Click, pumps, clicks again then stops.   Shot-shredded grass floats in the air above the scene and in a bloody mess Msese’s lion falls dead thirty feet in front of him.  Spray and pray.  It had worked.  One dead du-du.  In full lion form.  No were -ions here. Now he thinks of the others.  The lions and the beaters.  He thinks to reload and cover them. Then perhaps they will chase the other two lions.  Perhaps they can still track them.  Still get the other two. Then he looks about him.  Pursuit is moot.   He is the only human in sight.  The lions have shredded his small platoon. All about him, they moan and bleed. All eleven are down, many horribly wounded, a few near death.   Msese is a corpsman now, not a hunter.  Last man standing. How do they do this?  The villagers?   For most villagers, a machete is heavy armament.  They cost $2 to $5 apiece, depending on quality and they are surprisingly scarce because $5 is often a week’s income in some villages.     “Now that we are properly armed, we do not fear the lions so much,” Hannah’s teenaged male relatives told me back in Lindi.  I asked them what they carried, thinking it would be a rifle or shotgun.  Properly armed, they had said. “We have machetes now,” they said with great pride And I could not feign my amazement. “Guys,” I said.  “You face lions with machetes?  That won’t even slow them down, guys.  It won’t stop them at all.” “Yes, but we are more comfortable with them,” they say.   And the machete seems in part a magical spell that converts the du-du to real lion. Still, in close combat with lion, unless one is very skillful, a machete – pronounced without  the “a” sound on the end in Tanzania -- is little more than a lucky charm.  It gives you one “long tooth” against a lion that has a mouth of them and box-cutter claws on each paw.   Sometimes, the machetes do more harm than good. That day in the tall grass, a few brave villagers bear deep machete cuts where they have struck themselves or their comrades in the frenzy to beat away the lions. As Msese chewed on his toothpick one day, I nodded at the slender wood sliver and said,  “Machete— Simba’s toothpick.” and he nodded agreement grimly. “That was the worst, Mr. Robert,” he says of the tall grass.  There is a distant stare on his face, no laugh now.  He nods and the big man’s lips quiver just slightly even though the incident is nearly two-years in the past.   He says in English he is still learning. “That was the worst.  December, 6, 2004.  Nangara.  Amboozhus.  Ambush us.  That was the worst – my second lion – and I was very scared.”  He has killed 13 more since then – 15 in all.  But that has not been the worst.  For Mr. Msese has killed other mammals whose deaths haunt him more.   And if you think him a slaughterer of lions, and an anti-green look at this ledger and set the balanced books straight. Late 1980’s.  In the North.  Somalian-Tanzan border.  War in Somalia.  Automatic weapons –AK’s --- everywhere.  Poachers cross the border and begin decimating the wildlife in Tanzania and Kenya and Zimbabwe.  The game rangers are overwhelmed.  Out-gunned.  They have only “wait a minute” guns – bolt action game rifles versus AK-47’s, the “wait a minutes” named with sly African humor because their owners were said to stand up and ask the enemy to stop firing their machine guns while the rangers reloaded. The governments mobilize.  Msese and others get the guns they need.  Wildlife foundations put choppers in the air.  My dollars at work.  Judge it as you might. Western dollars for wildlife bought machine gun bullets that strafed the poachers below – “peed on them” as a Vietnam vet friend of mine once described the arc of tracer bullets from above to the ground below.  The poachers who have driven and slaughtered game learn what it is like to be driven.  To be helpless animals.  To be caught and pinioned. And to be slaughtered.  Shoot on sight is the rule for poachers – a death sentence for the professional rhino horn hunter and the bush meat villager as well.  A death sentence we do not impose here for bank robbers or looters – or even murderers if they are not resisting.   Anyone not supposed to be in a reserve was a poacher.  And dead.  Period.  Some report whole villages cleared and burned.  It escalates. The army joins the fight and military maneuvers put hammer to tong, then tong and hammer to anvil.   Msese and others drive hard against the poachers. I ask him if he had killed poachers.  As a journalist –looking back, this is not my finest moment  – I wanted to keep count.  How many lions had he killed?  How many poachers?  How many? I kept asking Harunnah to ask Msese. How many? How many?  I wanted to know.  Demanded to know.  How many poachers?  Did he kill any?  I was not angry, just persistent.  He was a tough guy.  He could take this.   Msese is Christian. Not an obvious one.  It is a land of Islam here.  He brushes the question away. Crosses himself ever so subtly, or so it seems to me.  Seems to mumble a prayer. Pushes out the palm of his hand as a gesture to stop me.  I repeat the question.  I’m a good journalist and a real dick sometimes.  Msese’s lips tremble.  The big man’s eyes well and the red parts glisten.  He brushes away the question again and says of the poachers only, “We killed so many.  We killed so many.” I ask again for a number.  Dozens?  He says nothing?  Hundreds then? No answer.  Tears well over Msese’s eyes and fall down both cheeks.  He is sort of quivering in place, his whole body.  Then I ask again, but Harunnah will no longer translate it and averts his eyes from me, then speaks to me not sharply but in a disappointed tone, as if I do not understand.   My guide is ashamed of me. “He cannot go on. Stop now, please.  Please, you will stop now.  He asks it.  Can you not see that?”     So call Msese a slaughterer of lions.   Call him a thug.  Call me one, then, too.  And all the good green media and donors.   We bought him the bullets and wrote the stories that gave him that job. In my experience, if Msese is a thug, no mobile of good intentions is properly weighted without one and we need to come up with another name for what Msese is.    And my guess as to the lion-human score?  Msese’s scoreboard? Lions, 15.  More this year, probably.  Humans?  Uncountable and unmentionable, a number that Msese lives with written on his heart that we, Christ, Allah, and magic – all of us on our very best day -- can ease only slightly right now, and I sense that the lion killer Gaspar Msese may be the best and most complex man I’ve met on this trip. As we are departing, several days later, I ask him with a straight face to control terrorist wildlife – the chickens that have awakened me each morning at 4:45 a.m.  He shakes his head no with a smile. “Mr. Msese, this is human-animal conflict that must be resolved,” I tell him.  “They are Ossamas, man.  Do not be fooled.  These chickens are terrorists, worse than lions.” He shakes his head no. “Mister Robert,” Mr. Msese says with a wry smile, speaking through Harunnah in phrases he has no doubt used with villagers when talking about other animals. “I understand the seriousness of the terror these chickens have struck in your heart. “And perhaps some discomfort in your sleeping.   But we must always be mindful to balance the interests of those who do not see them as terrorists just as we do for the lions and I am afraid there is no clear and present danger to you but there may be to the chickens and I would be forced to protect the chickens against you on behalf of others who have interest in the chickens so that the interests may be kept in balance for the good of all.”  I give him a broad smile and turn to Harunnah, no joke now. “Tell him we really need him in Rufijji, up north in the Selous.”  We are about to head out on the trapping expedition with Ikanda and Simpson and the truly dangerous part of the trip.  We are all a bit scared shiftless.  “Ask him please to come with us.” “It is not my district,” Mr. Msese says.  “I am sorry, I cannot come and must stay here.”   That was two weeks ago before the young man-eater walked into our lives.  And then walked out.   We hoped he would come back.  Or another lion.  But our trap was empty the next day.   Simpson looks up at the skull still strapped to the tree. “Leopard bait,” Simpson says again.  “At best.” And we still needed to trap a lion.  We really needed Msese and that staff he wielded when he hit a village.  We needed to put a collar on at least one cat.   And for that we needed bait.  Big bait.  Humor had drained from everyone as our unarmored mobile column bounced over the potholes and craters of Rufijji roads.    Michael, our wheel man, did not have a choice of hitting potholes the size of craters – only avoiding potholes the size of canyons.  We banged about inside the Land Cruiser, with its sturdy spring-suspension, eating Ikanda’s dust as he sped about with the smooth riding Land Rover with its coil springs and creamy Cadillac ride. From hunters’ camps to regional Wildlife Department headquarters we went. And back again.  From village to village.  Did they have ammunition?  Could we buy any?  Did they have beefs?  Even a goat?  I started eyeing chickens, still with a grudge to settle. Nothing.  No bullets. No beefs.  No bait.  There were American hunters in one hunting camp, and Simpson and I asked if we could approach our countrymen and beg some bullets, beg some bait.   We hung out in the “annex” – where the trackers, guides, game butchers, skin preparers and taxidermy specialists lived in  large, perma-temp tents.  Clotheslines of wire lined the perimeter of the camp and dried meat-strips hung like tinsel from the lines.  It resembled pictures of poachers’ forest camps I had seen – though this was a strictly legal op. And that is as close as we got to the bwanas.  The Invisible Hand barred the way. Down a narrow path, we could see their large wall tent.  An air conditioning  condenser ran off a generator.  There were two men and one guide from Zimbabwe, a PH, a professional hunter.  But the path might as well have been a thousand miles long.   They did not know we were there; we could not directly see them or wave.  Or make little praying motions. Professional hunting is a big business in Tanzania and the Wildlife Department officials would not let us near the hunters.  The WD runs these concessions, escorts the hunters, shares in the revenue.  Shared in far more, Dr. Baldus charged. The Americans cannot be bothered, a senior WD official tells us.  Besides he said, the American hunters were not shooting the proper caliber of ammunition.    Fair enough, but I didn’t remember us saying what kind of cartridges we needed, so I was not certain how they were certain they did not have the proper ones.   One cartridge we needed was a .375 – the “entry level” caliber used for the “Big Five” of lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo, and elephant.  It was almost impossible not to have these shells on a safari of this sort. Then I looked down in the dirt and saw a crimped, bright brass cartridge; dug it out with the toe of my boot.  This was in an area where the sighting of rifles is common so brass cartridges – most of them dinged and not suitable for re-loading -- were everywhere on the ground.  Simpson saw another and scuffed it out with the steel toe of his work boot.  Picked it up.   Turned it in the sun and squinted.  Mine says, “. 375” on it.  His says, “. 303 cal.”  The brass is fresh.  I sniff it and can still smell burnt accelerant – a nice acrid hit of it, fresh too.  Like the warming electrical circuits of an old-fashioned toaster, to my senses.  Unmistakable, if you’ve smelled it once. “Dairen, what kinds of rifles do our game rangers have?” I ask Simpson.  The Wildlife Department manager is standing there and has seen us dig up the cartridge shells.   He is wearing a crisp white shirt with epaulettes and begins looking down into the dirt, out into the forest and bush, anywhere but where we’re taking this conversation. “I believe one has a .375 and the other a .303,” Simpson says slowly in a drawl that seems to hang in the air like a perfect smoke ring.   We show the manager the shells, and while he is caught in a lie, he does not budge.   We blow into the empty shells, making a flute noise and stare him down.  He does not budge. “It cannot happen,” he says finally, looking away and down toward the ground, shaking his head with what seems a bit of shame.  Shame or not, in his eyes we are essentially panhandlers asking the manager of a very expensive restaurant to approach the diners for a handout.  Hunters can tip thousands of dollars – or withhold the same – on any given trip.    Wildlife Department rangers share directly and indirectly in such revenues, and so do the reserves themselves.  It is easy to blame hunters for our predicament and pit the very forces of self-righteous environmentalism against them.   I won’t do the latter here.  Or at least I will not stereotype them.  In fact, I had expected great things from them.   I had thought them the solution. I grew up in a hunting and gun culture in the Midwest and respect ethical hunters.  Big game hunting is not something I understand.  But I’ll condemn it when I stop eating meat from animals in stockyards and chickens from coops that suffer far more than wildlife do at the hands of hunters.  Packer and Ikanda are not big game hunter fans either, particularly, but both think hunting is the surest way to conserve nature here, and I learned long ago that the best policies often are powered by paradox as much as passion.   “The drag” of bait leads lions to traps…if you have enough bait. Hunters pay huge amounts of money and have a low impact on the environment.  By contrast, photo safaris of tree-hugging tourists like me dig deep ruts in the safari and contribute only a fraction of the revenue for the parks.  The Great Selous would just be the Selous without hunters.  They pay 80 percent of the park revenues.  They’ll drop $50,000 apiece for a 21-day safari.  The German doc crew and me?  We’ve shelled out about $5,000 in permits apiece – nothing compared to a hunter – and while we’ll bring some Euros and dollars to the villages, nothing like the thick wads brought by hunters. Besides that, I know hunters at home who seem to me true advocates of nature.   They only hunt game when conditions allow for “fair pursuit.”  The animal has a chance to escape.  Hunters save habitat.  Hunters love nature, too.  I tell these thoughts to Simpson who I know still hunts thinking he’ll buy that point of view.  I try to buck up my theory.  I really want to believe we’d have the shells if we could just have gotten around the WD and to the hunters. “Yeah, these guys are real fuckin’ sports,” Simpson says when I finish my line of reasoning.  “Did you notice the padded gun rest in the back of the one truck and the big light bar out the back?  They’re shooting lions and leopards at night over bait. From the truck.  Or from the road in daytime.  Real sporting.  Real fuckin’ sports, these guys.  Real nature lovers.”    “These guys aren’t hunters,” he says.  “They’re shooters.  Big difference.” Later, I talk to a professional hunter who is said to run an honest game.  He follows the rules.  He only lets clients shoot lions who are older and whose absence will not destroy the pride structure.  He explains this to his clients and in the areas he has leased in the Selous is attempting to stabilize the lion population. It needs it. “Some of these guys before, it’s clear they just shot the shit out of everything,” he says.  “Everyone knows it happens.  They’re out with a client and they see a lion – not a great trophy, but a lion. “They bag him.  That may be the only lion they see. “Then  a day later the true trophy pops up. What to do?  They’ve already shot their lion.  Or did they?  Mysteriously that first lion disappears.  They bag the second lion. “It can go on, but you get the picture.  There is not a concept among some of them of preserving pride structure.  You shoot a young male head of a pride and that pride falls on hard times.  A new male will  come in and kill all the cubs.  The social structure struggles. “ There is even one theory – not proved but not ridiculed either – that such pride desalination can increase the odds of man-eating.  Simpson and Ikanda at a trap site. Says another ethical hunter who holds rights in the Selous:  “The operators who held these blocks before us were extremely abusive to the game living in these areas, most particularly, lion. In our (one) block, our staff told us they killed ten male lion season before last. In our first season we took two; one aged at six and the other aged at eight years. In our three Selous blocks we took one male lion. In our first season we booked very lightly as we were unsure what the status of the game was. “Once we were in the areas, we found game to be extremely jumpy where vehicles were concerned. We were told that the previous operators often shot from the vehicles, which is in violation of good hunting ethics and Tanzanian law. “We did not see much game from the existing road system. Once we were able to open some new roads, we found concentrations of game that was basically untouched. By booking only enough hunters to take the minimum amount of quota required by the government, we rested our areas as much as possible. “ A client of the hunter confirmed the ethical approach.  The hunter was told ahead of time that only mature lions would be hunted.  The client bagged a trophy lion, but only after his guide had confirmed through sightings from six different positions that the lion was at least six years old. ----- But this was not how the game was being played on our trapping trip. If we had doubts about the rigged game, they were soon resolved.  A short time after Simpson and I dig up the cartridges, the news reaches us that even if there are cartridges, the “quota” for bait is exhausted.   We can shoot no more, even if there are bullets, even if we dig up every known spent cartridge from the hunters’ annex grounds and flaunt them in the face of the wildlife manager. No one in our group ever had heard that there was such a thing as a “quota” for bait and I confirm later that there is no such thing.  It is both a preposterous pronouncement and utterly pre-emptive of any other argument we can make.   I want to remain objective here; neutral.  But the scales seem clearly rigged and I am ashamed I had been so gullible to think the hunters and the WD would help. “Son, “ says a conservationist hunter I talked to later, “if you were in the middle of the Selous and couldn’t find but one lion and one bait then someone did not want you to find them. “The professional hunters, some of them?” he continued.  “Not really crazy about their clients seeing those big leather collars on a maned lion, you know?  They’re not going to let that happen, son.  Nobody wants to pay $35,000 to shoot a lion with a collar on it.” It’s nice to be called son when you’re over 50, but it’s depressing to know that some hunters – a breed I know as conservationists in the states – are perpetuating the conditions in Africa. Ikanda’s mission is to cop a hundred pounds or so of meat so he might save dozens, perhaps hundreds, even thousands of human lives and conserve lions.  He’s not a hunter basher.  He supports ethical hunting.  The WD manager is looking for a one-time tip.   I want to believe in the enlightened hunter model learned in my rural days.  Now, I just feel like a chump.  Dumber than a neo-con on a bad day in Baghdad.   But my urban experience as a big city reporter kicks in and I understand the situation with great clarity quickly after that.   Years back, when I was covering Philadelphia ward politics and the Abscam Scandal, a city councilman told a wired FBI agent dressed as oil sheik: “Money talks, bullshit walks.” We’re walking.   The Invisible Hand is pushing us farther and farther away from a reckoning with bait or bullets or lions.   There is a long version of this where we bounce around roads for days, then weeks, but the short one is this:   We never get bait.  We never trap the lions.  So do I blame the hunters?  It’s an easy end to the story.  It’s not one I can take.  I can say that the hunters in that one camp and that one WD official were uncooperative and helped cause the failure of our expedition.  But it’s too broad a brush for all hunters and whenever I feel those sort of “deep green” feelings, it’s a signal to stop and think.  Think what?  Well, if banning hunters helped lions, then why is Kenya, which banned lion hunting more than 20-years ago, so short on lions?  And it is not the hunters killing the people in the villages.  They are being killed by lions.  They will stop being killed by lions when they get guns.  Not too many guns.  Just enough to make them hard targets.  But why aren’t the hunters helping in this?  In the great tradition of the great white hunter – Corbett, Patterson, Rushby – the hunter steps in to protect the villagers.   I dump the problem of the hunters on the doorstep of an ethical hunter I respect and ask for his critique. I owe you a much more detailed response, but let me just say here that the hunting industry, for all of its ills, is responsible for the abundance of wildlife in Tanzania. You can see what would happen if opponents of hunting got their way by looking next door in Kenya. Do I approve of all of the practices and behaviors of individuals hunters? No way? Do I understand their collective importance in the sustainable use conservation of wildlife. Absolutely…. I plan to keep supporting hunting and using my bully pulpit to try to nudge the community toward exemplary behavior.    I believe the problem you are having trying to get people to deal with maneaters is not just due to hunters; it’s rooted in the fact that there may be no solution to this problem other than the extirpation of lions. By publicizing the horror of maneaters, you may be feeding the kind of sensibility that caused Germans to unite behind the idea of killing a brown bear that wandered into Germany recently from eastern Europe. No one wanted to deal with the bear: They killed it. I think everyone involved in wildlife in Africa senses the danger in what you are doing. Your work could arouse people to do to lions exactly what the Germans did to that hapless bear.   I am not criticizing you for your effort, Robert. … I salute your humanity, and I take you completely at face value – you care about the men, women and children being eaten and killed in a horrible way in rural Africa. I am absolutely sure that you love lions, too. They are the essence of wildness.   There are ways to help rural communities protect themselves against lions - wire mesh embedded in the mud of their huts, perhaps. Maybe flash-bang grenades. You’ve been there; you probably have better ideas than I do. Recently, the world united behind the idea of letting rural Africans use DDT again, not in the indiscriminate way they used to, but use it nonetheless, hang the fish eagles! Maybe the ultimate value of your work will be the publicizing of lion defenses. Push hard enough and the greenies and hunters alike will be shamed into helping fund these defenses.      On another level, though, what I think you have on your hands is a particularly wicked example of the world’s indifference to suffering. Complicating the situation is the lack of a suitable solution to the problem. No one wants to kill all the lions – at least not right now, unless you inflame passions that move millions to that point of view. …. It sets me back.  I don’t buy the idea that I’m going to inflame passions and kill lions.  But know he has my number.  There was a time when I was ready to kill lions.  Or help the effort.  In Lindi.   The day after I met the faces of the lion-dead data,   Early the next morning, I sat and talked with the elders and other leaders of Nyangamara, a village that is a sort of suburb of the larger village of Milali. They sit on a bench.  Rashid Likense Kannunga, 60, the village chairman, Hannah Likense Kannunga, his younger brother, and Ali Ngumba, 28, who lost his mother at age 14, look at me with stern faces.  They do not see joy inherent in visits from westerners.  The studies have created something of a media circus in the villages.  National Geo last Spring, Germany’s Arte channel now, Animal Planet scheduled in later, perhaps.  These are not simple men.  Kannunga is a medical doctor;  the villages face complex problems and the lions are perhaps as complex as any.   None of the westerners have done much to help.   Just taken pictures and gone away.   So I am not viewed by the elders as some force of fairness and objectivity.  Nor are they snowed by digital cameras and “moving pictures.”   Here is what they know.  Ngumba’s mother was killed in 1992 by a lion and his uncle heard the struggle and came to help.  With what?  The lion killed him as well. Used to be, they say, that you were exposed only in the remote bush…at the edge, the frontier.  No longer,.  The cats come right to the village.  Goats and the dogs are being eaten currently, they say,  and that is a sort of cat cuisine forecast for what comes next --- humans. No, not all lions, should be killed, said the eldest elder, Rashid – though young Ali would be perfectly happy with that state of affairs.   Lions should not be taken to zoos where they are to be made fun of, Rashid says.   The problem lions should be killed, though.  The ones who are so aggressive that they hunt humans.  This is not opportunistic. It’s planned, he says.   How can anyone argue with that?  How can the western media portray the villagers – all but defenseless, really – as slaughterers of lions? And then he turns to me – eyes on me -- and through Harunnah says: “If he really wants to help us, tell him to stop taking notes and writing stories and buy us a gun.  Or machetes. Or ammunition.  Stories do us no good when we are unarmed facing lions.  How do we face a lion with his words?” At that time, I felt a long way from Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and the Sierra Club. I am deathly sick of stories about children being snatched from the villages, sick of seeing the wounds and amputated stumps of the survivors.    If the elder had not said he agreed with the idea of protecting lions – if he had not respected lions with his zoo comment – then he would have gotten my journalist speech.  About objectivity.  About the impropriety of me doing such a thing. Instead, the idea of being able to do something so simple as to provide a defense against a carnivore attempting to kill one’s mother cut through the clutter of issues and ethics and the elder got no high-minded lecture from me.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The pen is mightier than the sword, but it was a damned long time until my deadline and the big cats were already killing the goats and dogs and everyone knew what was next.   Throw my pens at’em boys.  The gel points leave a stain those lions will never get out. “How much?” I asked and when they said 300,000 Tanzanian shillings I knew the price – around $300 -- was about right for a good pump shotgun and a dozen boxes of shells.  I reached for my money belt, about to peel off three crisp US hundred dollar bills and held them out.   I could not afford it.  I could not afford not to offer it.   There and then.  Immediately. Harunnah stopped me short of comitting a Tanzanian felony and said we would coordinate this with Gaspar Msese.   The village would get its money, but it would be handled through channels. “Mister Robert,” Msese called me moments after that for the first time.  “Mister  Robert,” he said and slapped me hard on my back – and I mean hard -- and then offered me a full Tanzan handshake – grasped hands with thumbs crossing like a soul shake, followed by a western handshake, with a repeat of the thumb crossing soul shake, a double flick of the thumbs and a parting of fingers pattering and patting against the other’s as the hand withdraws.  “Eeee-heh-heh-heh-heh…” he laughed but this time with an entirely different approving inflection. That was then. This is now.  Do I want to arm the villages sanely?  Yes.  A four day head start and fights with villagers with machetes is not a fair match.  Do I want lions slaughtered?  No.   I write back to my hunter colleague him and he writes back simply, “Lion politics are very complicated right now. I’m not a hunting ideologue either. Welcome to the community of those who look squarely at the issues involved and want to see these magnificent animals survive. “    Our expedition is lost, then, if not geographically, then in purpose and mission.  We cannot get bait.  We cannot collar lions.  We cannot produce knowledge – that slimmest of victories in this particular conflict.  I have no idea what the solution is to this. Still, we have a moment of glory.  One small victory.  In one of our sets, with just small scraps, Simpson snares a hyena.  It is not what we want.  Just a little success.  Just a little something.   You take that when you can.      Simpson had said he liked snaring hyenas as much as lions if not more because one did not use a dart on a hyena.  You took them down barehanded, more or less, like a cowboy does a dawgie. “You rope’em … and choke’em.  It’s just you and your critter, man.  It’s the greatest feeling… in the world.  Time just stops and there is nothing else.  A hyena can be just as dangerous as a lion and anyone who thinks they are cowards has watched too much outdated nature television.  “They are hugely fierce animals…in many ways more dangerous than a lion when in a trap…but I look in those big dark eyes…and I….just….disappear….I’m so in love at that moment.”     Simpson with his sawed-back 12 gauge And there they were one morning, the dark, dark eyes of  a large female, a little thin, but still a good 150 pounds with jaws that rivaled a Great White Shark for bite strength.  The trouble was that Simpson just seemed tired.   He seemed somehow not up for it.  He was 53 now.  Also, the sand fly parasite he had acquired in Bolivia chasing Jaguars – leischmaniagis brazilinzis was the parasite’s scientific name – was back.  Amastigotes, essentially sub-cellular sized eggs, were again active and his whole right cheek was slightly swollen as his immune system attempted to fight back the hatch there.  Two fistula-like pores had appeared and that almost meant more chemo back at Duke University.  Exhausting stuff.    Checking the traps the first day, Simpson found that a hyena had “slipped through the back door”—parted his brush wall and gotten the bait from behind. “I’m going to set a little surprise for this one,” he said, as he began re-rigging the trap with sets at the front and backdoor.  “This is personal.  It’s about respect. You don’t do this to me twice.” And indeed, the old girl hyena in the snare now had tried to come through the back-door and run into Simpson’s new surprise. Simpson through my eyes was Davy Crocket, or seemed to be. Packer differed only in his choice of American personalities.  “He’s Wild Bill Hickock – what else can I say?  He is the best there is.” Through African eyes?     Was he real?  Or some American creation, some California weirdo?   Someone who had watched too many movies and liked to play in Africa.   My thoughts weren’t skeptical at the moment.  The scene was too alive and I had unexpectedly become a bit player living completely in the moment.    Simpson had left the front seat of our overland vehicle, just before he set out for the trap, and with that ever so tired look, slapped the sawed-off pump shotgun he left on the seat and said with no bravado, just a weary statement of fact:   “There are seven in the magazine, Bob.   Chamber’s empty so pump it once to load, just in case you need to know. ”   Then he walked toward the hyena. All of us, crowded into our two overland vehicles, craned forward – me leaning toward the shotgun, a bit puzzled at my new role as back-up man -- and watched Dairen 60 feet away, as if we were at a small drive-in theater.  The feature began. Simpson may have loved those dark, dark eyes of the hyena, but the hyena trapped this day – snagged by Simpson’s thick stainless steel cable tight about her rear left leg –  was not interested in inter-species romance.  She made one half-hearted dash for freedom, was way too smart to think that would work, was turned by the trap cable on her foot and without hesitation further flight or struggle then faced Simpson head on.   Never did she cower.   She was an old girl and this seemed to be her last stand and she faced that inevitability with grace and courage. Then you could see it happen as Dairen said it would, see them lock eye-to-eye and begin the dance.  Her mouth formed a big dark oval – like a jet intake scoop -- and she sounded a booming click, a soft noise – ohhhhhh-ko-ko-ko-ko-ko.  It was one of those quiet octaves that somehow also clicked  -- ever so ominous, close kin to a Steven Spielberg soundtrack just before the raptors attack.  Simpson moved to his left, long stick in one hand, neck loop snare on a pole in the other. She followed the arc of the locus of her allowed outermost points, proscribed like a protractor by the snare’s cable anchored to a sturdy tree, eyes locked on Simpson’s as he said they would be. Simpson then gave her his long and sturdy hardwood stick, about two inches in diameter, as a diversion.  He’d had the stick for awhile.  There were teeth marks on the end.  She cracked off the bottom six inches as if it were a clown’s balsa prop  -- the bite force of a hyena is about double a lion’s  – then grabbed the next six, pulled Simpson forward into her reach, then torqued the stick to her right with powerful jaw and neck muscles that nearly flipped Simpson on his side.  Simpson     He teetered to his left, staggered, fought the stick with one hand, tottered then and started to fall in and over into her, it seemed.   His rakish hat fell to the ground.  He seemed beat, seemed done, off balance and falling over, over, over and down into the red dust of Rufijji and the savannah set of the Selous, far too close to the hyena’s jaws.   Now I was leaning over toward the shotgun, stowed in the front seat, then, touching the stock at its pistol grip wondering what I could do next – probably nothing to do by the time I got there if the hyena got him, really -- when a low, collective, “ohhh” came from inside our Land Cruiser.   I looked up and Simpson had flipped the tables on the old girl. In one movement, he awkwardly had steadied himself, stuck the stick back into the hyena’s mouth and as she was again shredding it, looped a