It had turned into a tough season for Rachel. First Naomi, her mother, the oldest animal in the troop, had disappeared, no doubt picked off by a predator. Rachel seemed mopey and depressed. Then Isaac, Rachel’s friend, goes and starts spending a lot of his time at a neighboring troop, clearly contemplating transferring. This, after I’d been extolling to Lisa his unique male sensitivity. Just when Rachel needs him most, Lisa’d fume, and he’s off checking out the junior high school girls in the next troop…. Honey, you know, it’s appropriate for them to act like baboons, I’d muster weakly in his defense. He ultimately decided not to transfer and settled back in the troop, but the whole episode made him seem like kind of a jerk.
So we were discussing Isaac’s disappointing behavior, sitting in camp at dawn, drinking tea before heading out to the baboons. Richard had just wandered in, walking the mile or so from his site to join us. How are you? How was the night? It’s not so cold this morning. How did you sleep? We slept fine. Did you hear the elephants? Do you want some tea? All the usual. Just as we’re finishing the tea and getting ready to head out, Richard offhandedly says, There is a small problem. Oh, really, what?
Further downriver there was a campsite where tourists could stay in pup tents. Some Masai guarded the site, a couple of cooks rustled up communal meals for everyone. Low-rent safaris and more fun than staying in the fancy lodges. The latest group of tourists had left a few days ago, and the guards and cooks were minding the store until the next group showed up. Richard nonchalantly relates that during the night, a hyena ripped into the tent of the old cook, dragged him out for dinner, and, after a great tussle and much injury, the hyena was driven off.
We leap up, excited, alarmed—Is the old man okay, we have to go get him, let’s drive there immediately, get the medical supplies, so on. Richard, the picture of calm, says, No worry, he is on his way over right now.
We run over to the river crossing to find that, indeed, there he is, this little old man, limping toward camp. We rush toward him. He is totally lacerated, ripped apart on his arms, his chest, his forehead. Oh my god, old man, are you okay? I am fine, how was your night? How did you sleep? How are your parents these days? Bizarrely, he forces us to go through the various greeting rituals before settling down to the more pressing fact that he’s been shredded by this hyena.
We get him into camp. We are galvanized into action—pulling all the medical supplies out of the tent, ready for anything. We want to drive him to park headquarters immediately to get him air evacuated by the flying doctor’s service. Nah, he says, it’s not so bad, I’ll be fine. Not so bad? You’re a mess, you’re bleeding everywhere, you’ll need hundreds of stitches, we need to get you some morphine. Richard, glancing up from his second cup of tea, suggests some aspirin for him. Sure, an aspirin would be nice, the old man agrees.
Feeling useless and thrown off kilter by all this nonchalance, we meekly give him an aspirin and some tea. After drinking some he adds, Oh, another thing, do you think you can put my finger back on?
He has a ripped piece of cloth wrapped around what we assumed was his injured ring finger. Removing the cloth, we find that said finger is now gone. Uh, just where is your finger, old man?
He fishes around in his pocket (“Okay,” Lisa and I say to each other, “let’s just brace ourselves now”), and out comes his finger. In a plastic bag. Filled with salt. Good bush camp cook that he is, he knows about preserving meat, and after the hyena was driven off at midnight, he searched around in the grass with his flashlight, found his finger, and then proceeded to salt it.
We break the bad news to him. Sorry, we don’t know how to put fingers back on. He takes it bravely—“That is all right, can I have more tea?”—and puts his bag away.
While he luxuriates with his drink and continues to bleed all over everything, we press him to let us take him to headquarters for air evacuation. No need. Before walking the three miles to our camp, he walked over to another tourist campsite and arranged for a driver friend, who is returning to Nairobi today, to give him a lift to the hospital in Nairobi. We offer to drive him to that other campsite, an offer he accepts, but first he has to stop at his own camp—he needs to change into his dress clothes, suitable for a trip into the big city, so that he can spend the next six hours in the vehicle ruining them by bleeding all over them.
Driving over, we get some more details. The hyena ripped into his sleeping tent around midnight, seized him, and dragged him out, intent on dinner. He had fought the hyena, and the Masai guards came out and speared it. We listen to this with increasing trepidation. The only reason we can sleep peacefully at night is with the thoroughly inculcated belief that when you go inside a tent, you stop existing, as far as the animals are concerned. Over and over, we tell ourselves that the animals can’t figure out where you went, they haven’t reached the Piagetian cognitive stage yet of understanding “insideness,” and we are safe. And now he’s regaling us about the hyena tearing into the tent. Anxiety.
We reach his campsite, and while he is changing into his Sunday best, we inspect the tent. Which puzzles us. There’s blood here and there, all over camp, in fact, but the tent is perfectly intact. No rip. We begin to question him, he gets sheepish and evasive, and eventually we get the answer. After a mere decade being a camp cook in the bush and learning what you do and don’t do, last night for some inexplicable reason he had decided to get his forty winks sleeping in the food tent amid the sausages. A tent that, for some equally inexplicable reason, had no floor on the bottom so that an inquisitive hyena could just slip underneath the walls and raid the refrigerator.
Ah-ha, so now he’s sleeping in the food tent, the hyena slips in, starts munching him until the Masai spear him. We are relieved at having our safe-in-a-closed-tent rule reinstated and marvel at his foolishness.
So the old man was in the wrong tent, but that is fine. Soon, however, a complication arises. He returns to his dressing under the watchful eye of the Masai guards, standing there stolid and silent with their spears—the heroes of our story, two guys we don’t know, from a few villages over. And off on the side is the other camp cook, a younger guy who, like the old fingerless man, is from a non-Masai agricultural tribe. He is clearly agitated about something. We schmooze with the Masai while Richard talks to him. And the story comes out—the Masai guards didn’t save the old man after all. The Masai guards had abandoned their jobs, were off drunk as skunks in the village, carousing. The second cook was the one who had come to the rescue, barreling out into the middle of the wrestling match and bonking the hyena over the head with a rock, driving it off. And now the Masai, fearful that the word of their AWOL status would get around and they would lose their jobs, were threatening the life of the second cook.
Oh, great. All this is being told to us in a way that makes it perfectly clear to the Masai that we know what’s up. To cover our asses a bit, we spend some time scraping and bowing before them and their spears, telling them what brave heroes they are, they are real warriors, and so on. It seems to calm things down a bit—we have made it clear that we are not blowing the whistle on them. The old man departs with his ride, the second cook is mollified, the brave warriors return to the village to resume their stuporous drinking, and we pass the morning up and down the river telling all concerned what saints these guys were, spearing and killing the rogue hyena.
So the old man was in the wrong tent and the Masai weren’t really there doing their jobs, but everything still seems okay. Then late afternoon, a complication arises. It seems that after the second cook had bonked the hyena over the head with the rock, the hyena took off, ran a mile to the Masai village, killed a goat, and attacked a man. Who did indeed spear it to death. And now, amid great attention and clucking, there is a dead hyena in the middle of the village with only a single spear wound in it. Late afternoon, the drunken heroes return to the campsite to threaten the poor second cook with murder once again until a new version of the events is worked out that is reconcilable with the inconvenient evidence in Exhibit A, the dead hyena. So the story becomes that the brave warriors had leapt into the battle with the hyena the night before without time even to grab their spears. Instead, it is now they who had bonked the hyena over the head with the rock.
Dutifully, we spend the rest of the day passing on that version of the story and expressing our boundless admiration for the stalwart pair. So the old man was in the wrong tent, the Masai weren’t really there doing their jobs, and the first version of the cover-up story didn’t work, but the second seems to be a big hit and everything is fine.
Two days later, a complication arises. An acquaintance, a bush pilot, has just flown in from Nairobi, and he passes on the latest newspaper to us. And there on page 3 is the old man in the Nairobi hospital, smiling, displaying his mangled hand and his now-famous plastic bag. One of the hospital staff, no doubt spotting a good story and hoping for some money, had called the newspaper, which sent someone to interview the man. “Camp cook single-handedly fights off hyena in game park.” In this version, the old man had been in his sleeping tent, the hyena ripped in, the other cook and two guards were nowhere to be seen, and it was now the old man who reached for a boulder and bashed the hyena a good one. Somehow, within an hour, everyone knows about the newspaper article, even the Masai, who’ve never seen a newspaper in their lives.
So the old man was in the wrong tent, the Masai weren’t really there doing their jobs, the first revisionist story hadn’t worked, and now the published version contradicts everyone else’s. Irritation roils up and down the river that day—everyone had worked out something tolerable in terms of saving face for the guards, and now the dumb-ass old man grabs the limelight and makes everyone look bad. And because it is in the newspaper, the tourist company in Nairobi will be sure to notice and somebody is going to get raked over the coals.
A few days later, the company speaks. Surprisingly, it is via the newspaper, delivered by the bush pilot chancing through the reserve again. In a follow-up story, the newspaper reports that the company categorically denied that the old man was their employee, claimed never to have heard of him. He was obviously just some guy passing through the area who had gotten drunk at the Masai village and, while staggering out afterward, was attacked by a hyena. And now he had claimed to be an employee just to stick the company with the medical bills. Or, the company hinted darkly, maybe he had even chopped off his own finger and then claimed that he was an employee in order to hustle insurance money off the company. But the company stoically refused to be bamboozled by such an obvious scam. And since the old man didn’t really work for them, the company was paradoxically free to now fire him for no particular reason. The whole problem was taken care of, things along the river now could settle down—neither the old man nor the hyena had ever existed.