Laikipia, Kenya
This month, in broad daylight on our Kenyan farm, a lioness mauled one of my bull calves. Before she could make a kill, a quick-witted herder intervened and drove the beast off. My son Rider loaded the injured calf into the pickup and brought it home, where he gently cleaned the tooth and claw wounds, then injected the poor creature with antibiotics and a painkiller. Big cat injuries go bad fast, but we all felt cheered that the calf, to my mind a future champion Boran bull, had survived and might pull through. The next morning the calf got to his feet and suckled his mother. What a sight that was. The morning after that, the mother was out grazing with her calf when she inadvertently bashed into a tree in which hung a beehive. The African bees, now angry, poured out of the hive and stung the injured calf to death. Rider was quite emotional about it. Life out here can be harsh.
When my family farmed in West Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, my father had a fine Boran bull called Larasha. He adored that bull, which he had bought from the great Boran rancher Miles Fletcher in Kenya. At that time, a troublesome lion was regularly killing cattle out in the bomas of the neighbouring Maasai pastoralists. One night Dad’s stockman was driving home in our old Series 3 Land Rover, which had no windscreen or top, when the headlights illuminated a male lion on the track. He slowed down, expecting the beast to move off, but instead it placed its front paws on the radiator and roared at him.
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