CHICAGO -- The two lions stalked through my imagination for 40 years and when I found them, lurking with eternal menace in a far corner of a vast building, the hair stirred on the back of my neck.
Gaunt, battered, lacking even a hint of a mane, they are so unprepossessing that many museum-goers walk past them with only a cursory glance.
But they are the world's most famous lions, the beasts that stopped the construction of a great railroad. Their massive jaws are the last thing 130 people ever saw.
These are the man-eaters of Tsavo.
Their story is a cornerstone of the great lore of colonial Africa, a tale that has fired the imagination of boys and girls -- and men and women -- for three-quarters of a century.
I was a small boy on a farm in Oklahoma when a family friend gave me his own boyhood copy of Col. J.H. Patterson's 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,' his 1927 account of the lions' reign of terror.
I have reread that book, I suppose, every five years or so. A few days ago, four decades after I first read it, I realized a small but long-cherished dream. I walked down the long Hall of African Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History to see them.
One is creeping on its belly over a rock, full of sinister intent; the other stands incongruously beside him as though searching not for a meal, but for a good scratch behind the ears.
It took the colonel nine terrible months to kill the man-eaters of Tsavo; he came frightfully close to falling prey to them himself.
When they were finally dead the man-eaters were, of course, skinned, and their skulls and pelts remained with the colonel as rugs until 1924, when he came to Chicago to a lecture on his African adventures at the Field Museum.
According to a museum document, he mentioned then to Stanley Field 'that he still possessed the skins of the famous killers of men.' Field promptly bought them.
The annual report of Museum Director D.C. Davies for 1925 says the Tsavo lion skins were turned into lifelike mounts 'only by the exercise of much painstaking care and skillful manipulation' by museum taxidermist Julius Friesser, 'with the assistance of Mr. H.C. Holling.'
Although thousands of visitors may trudge by the Tsavo lions without reading the fine print on the display card, Bob Izor, manager of the mammal collection, says a lot of sentimentalists still find it the museum's main attraction.
Not long ago, he said, Safari Club International offered to fund a much more glamorous display of the Tsavo lions, complete with audio-visual elements. But after long consideration, Izor said, the museum turned down the proposal on the ground that it would ultimately be detrimental to the mammal display as a whole.
It's probably just as well. The man-eaters of Tsavo are relics of a world long gone, a world of exploration and danger and discovery, not of audio-visual displays. Those with a feeling for it can sit on the hard bench beside the Tsavo lions, look into those lifelike amber eyes and imagine how it must have been.
The lions were both males. What made them into man-eaters, and why two males came to work cooperatively, has never been established. The number of their victims has been placed anywhere from 28 to 135; from Patterson's account the higher figures, including natives as well as Indians, seem more likely.
Patterson was not Jim Corbett of India, nor Selous or Karamojo Bell of Africa. He was no great hunter or tracker. He was an engineer, sent to the desolate Tsavo region of what is now Kenya in 1898 to bridge the Tsavo River for the Uganda Railroad, which eventually connected the port of Mombasa with Lake Victoria.
The railroad had imported hundreds of Sikh and Hindu workmen and artisans from India to run the rails through the arid region of stunted trees and formidable 'wait-a-bit' thornbushes.
It was within a few days of Patterson's arrival at the railhead that the lions first struck. One of them simply walked into a tent, snapped up a workman like an hors d'oeuvre at a cocktail party, and walked out with him.
Thus began the long nights of terror for the workmen and agonized frustration for Patterson.
Workmen's camps were spread for 16 miles around the railhead and when a lion carried a victim away from one of the camps, Patterson rushed there and waited up the next night with his rifle, hoping the beasts would return.
Instead, he heard mighty roars, cries of terror and the screams of a victim snatched from a different camp. They never hit the same camp twice in a row.
Gradually the lions grew bolder. The workmen built huge walls, or bomas, of uprooted thornbushes to surround their camps. Not just one, but both lions would go through or over these seemingly impenetrable walls. The man-eaters ignored fires. The Indians began creating a constant din through the night, banging on pots and pans; the lions seemed deaf to it.
One night Patterson and the district medical officer, Brock, sat up at the open door of an empty boxcar parked by an abandoned camp. After a few hours, it became evident that one of the lions was stalking them. The tension mounted in the darkness, Patterson wrote, 'until the strain on my nerves was almost unendurable.
'Then -- suddenly -- a huge body sprang at us.' Both men cried out and fired, missing but deflecting the charge enough to save them. 'He got so close to me that I felt the wipe of his paw across my face,' Patterson wrote.
The man-eaters even grew so bold they began eating their kills within audible range of the camps.
'I could plainly hear them crunching the bones,' Patterson wrote, 'and the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days after.'
So many of the Indian workmen tried to crawl into a single tree to sleep one evening that it fell over.
Finally the Indians broke. Most of them showed up at Patterson's hut and told him they were leaving and would not return until the demons, as they believed the man-eaters to be, were gone. Then they lay down on the tracks to stop the next train out and swarmed aboard it.
Several hundred workmen remained faithful, and the lions continued to dine on them.
It has never been made clear why a professional hunter, or at least an experienced one, was not rushed to the railhead to deal with the demons. Certainly Patterson was no fool, and it was obvious that the best he could do was not getting him very far. He asked for help.
What he got was the district officer, a gentleman named Whitehead, and Whitehead's gun bearer, Abdullah. They were scarcely the answer to Patterson's prayer. They arrived at the station the night of Dec. 3, 1898, and the doughty Whitehead decided to walk the half mile to Patterson's camp.
When Patterson found him the next morning, Whitehead's shirt was in tatters and he was bleeding from a claw-wound down his back. Abdullah was not so fortunate. The lions ate him.
There followed a series of misadventures that would have been comical had not people been dying. Patterson devised a massive, Rube Goldbergish cage-trap and actually caught one of the lions in it. But the Indian soldiers assigned to execute the trapped lion panicked and shot away one of the bars of the cage. The lion, unscathed, escaped.
One day not long after that, Patterson came face to face with one of the lions; had him dead in the sights of his borrowed rifle at 15 yards -- and the rifle misfired. The lion escaped.
A few weeks later, while sitting up one night in a makeshift scaffolding near the remains of a dead donkey, Patterson was dismayed to discover one of the lions was stalking him again. Unable to see the beast clearly, he was holding his breath and wondering what to do next when something hit him on the head, frightening him so badly he nearly toppled off into the lion's lap. It was an owl that had mistaken him for a tree branch.
Beset by owls as well as lions, his workmen dying and his railroad stalled, Patterson was suddenly at the end of his rope. Without further ado, he opened fire on the dark shadow he believed to be the lion -- and for once was right. When dawn came, he found the lion dead.
At last his luck had turned. Twice Patterson wounded the second lion and the second time, when the hunter and his gun bearer began following the blood spoor, the lion charged them.
Patterson's first shot apparently missed. His second shot knocked the lion down, but it sprang back up to resume its attack and his third shot had no effect. Calmly he reached out for his second, and heavier, rifle -- to discover that his gun bearer had bolted for the nearest tree.
Patterson set out for the tree himself, and only the fact that one of his bullets had broken one of the lion's hind legs saved him. The crippled lion pursued him to the tree, and then fell over.
Joyfully Patterson jumped down out of the tree -- only to have the beast get up and come for him again. But he had brought his second rifle with him, and finally killed the last of the demons.
In London, the British prime minister rose to advise the House of Lords that work on the Uganda Railroad, 'put to a stop because a pair of man-eating lions appeared in the locality and conceived a most unfortunate taste for our workmen,' had once again resumed.
