The lion came in low and very fast, seemingly out of nowhere. Pete Barrett saw Henry Poolman knocked aside, and the next thing he remembered he was looking down at the top of the great cat’s head, and it had his left forearm between its jaws and was crunching down on bone.
Barrett’s rifle was in his right hand and he belted the lion hard with the barrel, a futile, instinctive blow that had no more effect than a slap with a hat. The cat’s swift, savage rush carried Pete to the ground, and he fell on top of it with his wrist still in its mouth.
“If I live 100 years I’ll never forget his huge black-maned head only inches from my face, his eyes blazing into mine like orbs of yellow fire,” Barrett told me. “Although it takes time to tell it, it happened and was over within seconds. But the details are branded indelibly in my mind.”
They had not started out after a lion that morning. It was a buffalo they wanted. Poolman, Barrett’s wife Jean, and he had left camp before daylight with two black trackers and gunbearers, Gatia and David.
They were camped at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, in excellent game country midway between Tsavo National Park and the Masai Amboseli Game Reserve. They had been three weeks on a Kenya safari and this was the last day.
It had been an exciting hunt and they had taken some splendid animals, including a rogue elephant that came as an unexpected bonus; it carried almost 100 pounds of ivory on each side.
A 57-year-old retired manufacturing executive from Buffalo, New York, with a wife and three grown sons, Barrett had taken every opportunity to hunt during the last 20 years, mostly for ducks, upland birds, deer and elk.
It started when he moved to Boise, Idaho, with his family in 1949. He enjoyed great duck shooting around there, and the bug bit him. From that he went on to big game. The Barretts lived at Boise for several years, and by the time they left, Pete had done well on deer and elk and had livened things up by killing a bear and a bobcat or two.
In the spring of 1966, an invitation came along that was more than the Barretts could resist. They were spending an evening with friends, Steve Spaulding and his wife Belle. Steve was in his late 50s, an executive with the Buffalo Aeronautical Corporation, and a year or so before he and Belle had had a very successful hunt in Kenya.
Out of the blue that night, Steve said, “We’re going back next winter. How would you two like to join us?”
It didn’t take long for Pete and Jean to accept, and Steve started to make arrangements with the Nairobi safari firm of Ker, Downey and Selby. A hunt was booked to start March 1, 1967. The party was assigned four top-grade hunting blocks, and they got two of the best white hunters in the business, Henry Poolman and Terry Mathews.
Much as Pete enjoys hunting, he had never been greatly interested in trophies, and he did not want to start an African collection or go on the trip looking like a glory-seeking American sportsman. That problem was solved when the Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences, where he had contacts, asked him to convert the hunt into a quasi-scientific project by bringing back bird and animal specimens for their East African collection. The museum would arrange the necessary permits for anything not covered by the regular licenses.
The four flew to Nairobi via Zurich the last week in February. They put in two or three days getting acquainted with their hunters, obtaining proper safari clothing and visiting Nairobi National Park for a look (for Jean and Pete the first) at Africa’s rich and teeming variety of wildlife. They saw a great variety of game within 15 minutes of downtown.
They left Nairobi on the morning of March 1, heading north toward their first camp in dry hilly country near the south end of Lake Rudolph, in the Northern Frontier District. The group consisted of 30 in all. There were Steve and Belle, Jean and Pete, Poolman and Mathews. They had 24 safari hands, who would serve as skinners, trackers and gun bearers, and would staff the commissary department. The blacks were all natives of Kenya, mostly from the Kikuyu tribe.
The Spauldings had Terry as their white hunter and they rode north with him in his Land Rover. Jean and Pete would hunt with Henry, and they were in his Toyota Landcruiser. Both vehicles were 4-wheel-drive and would be used as hunting cars.
It was quickly apparent that the Barretts had drawn an ace hunter. Thirty-six years old, Poolman stood about 6 feet 2 and weighed 220 or better, without an ounce of fat. He knew African game as well as a man can, was tireless at following an animal, a crack rifle shot, cool and sure in a pinch. If he had a fault it was contempt for danger to himself. His right thigh was badly scarred from an encounter with a lion a few years before.
A Nairobi paper would call him, after his death, “a great bull of a man,” and the description fitted in its most complimentary sense.
When he was not off on safari his home was on a fine farm at Naro Moru, north of Nairobi, where he lived with his wife and their daughter Adelaide, then five years old.
The second day the party reached the native town of Baragoi, consisting of a mission school, a small store and a cluster of mud huts. There they set up camp on the banks of a dry wash just outside the three-mile protected zone around the town.
The area was good game country, especially for various antelopes, and it teemed with birds. In the next few days, they took oryx, gerenuk and Grevey’s zebra and got a head start on their bird collection.
Terry Mathews was an authority on the birds of East Africa. He had borrowed two excellent bird skinners from the Nairobi National Museum to accompany the safari. The variety and number of birds was amazing, and the two skinners were soon busy from sunup until after dark every day. Terry took care of the labeling and helped with the skinning.
By the end of the safari, they had collected more than 300 birds, representing 230 different species and ranging from hummingbirds to vultures and marabou storks. Except for the larger kinds, they were shot with a .410-gauge shotgun or .22 rifle using No. 12 “dust” shot. Out of the 300, only three were mutilated badly enough to be unusable.
Before they left Nairobi, they had been told of a trouble-hunting rhino that was bothering herdsmen on a ranch near Rumuruti, about 150 miles south of Baragoi. When they were offered a permit to kill it, they jumped at the chance, for rhinos are becoming scarce in Kenya and getting a permit to take one is far from easy. If they shot this one, it would provide a specimen of major importance for the Buffalo museum.
They drove south to the Milner ranch at Rumuruti and set up tents in the front yard. They were given the use of the guest-house bathroom facilities, a real luxury on safari, and for the next few days they lived like kings, invited to hunt on neighboring ranches and enjoying new-found friends.
Steve and Pete caught up with the renegade rhino the first morning. They came on it at 30 yards, as it was browsing in shoulder-high bush. Barrett was carrying a .458 Magnum Winchester Model 70, Steve a .470 Holland and Holland double. Both were loaded with 500-grain full-metal-case bullets.
The rhino whirled to face them but changed its mind, swung broadside and pounded across in front, hidden by thick brush. When it broke into the open, they fired together, and the huge ungainly brute actually turned a somersault. Its head dropped, its horn dug into the ground and the massive body flipped heels over applecart.
One bullet had gone through the heart, the other had entered the neck, passed through the brain and come out the forehead, nicking the back horn. It had been an easy kill, but after all a rhino is a rhino, and they were able to send the skin back to the museum for a full body mount.
They took impala, gazelle, waterbuck and more birds at that camp. Lions were bothering a herd of prize Santa Gertrudis cattle on a neighboring ranch and they put out baits, but attracted no takers.
They left at the end of five days, stopped in Nairobi to drop off their trophies and replenish their supply of film. Then they drove south 200 miles to two hunting blocks at the foot of Kilimanjaro.
They camped on a small creek about 30 miles north of Rombo, a Masai manyetta, the usual collection of mud and cowdung huts. But because the Masai are herdsmen, this village was in the form of a kraal, enclosed by a boma of thornbush inside which the goats were kept and the cattle driven at night for protection from lions, leopards and hyenas.
Here, the hunters hoped to take buffalo, fringe-eared oryx, reedbuck, eland and lesser kudu. They were due for a bonus, too. On their first trip past Rombo they were stopped by a native game warden. He spoke no English, but Henry was fluent in Swahili, and talk flew back and forth between them. Finally, Henry turned to Pete with a broad grin.
“Bloody elephant is tearing up their corn patches and storage huts,” he explained. “The blighter has to be shot, and he’s offering us the chance. What do you say?”
Pete said yes in a hurry. A chance at an elephant was something he had not even thought about.
Early the next morning the game warden and his assistant led Poolman and Barrett out to a waterhole and showed them the dishpan-size tracks of the renegade bull. The hunt turned out to be a long hard walk. The country was dust-dry, and as the sun climbed the day got very hot. They followed the tracks for seven hours. When they finally overtook the elephant, he was standing in an open place at the edge of a clump of trees 200 yards ahead.
The stalk was easy. Brush hid the men the first 150 yards. At the edge of cover, hardly more than 40 yards away, Henry spoke a short sharp order: “Take him now. He’s seen us.”
Pete was carrying the .458 Winchester with solid bullets. Henry had emphasized that the fatal shot on an elephant is in the “earhole,” a spot on the side of the head just in front of the ear, marked by a fold of skin. A bullet there goes into the brain and kills instantly.
Barrett thought he knew what to look for, but the massive gray brute was backlighted by the sun, with the side of its head in shadow. Pete made out a dark patch that he took for the earhole and put his 500-grain solid into it. The elephant didn’t flinch. He tried again in the same place and it whirled and ran.
Pete got another chance and shot for the spine but didn’t quite connect. The bull was getting away, wounded, and Henry did what a white hunter is supposed to do. He fired his .470 and broke a hind leg.
Barrett learned something then. An elephant can’t travel on three legs. This one pitched forward so hard he drove his tusks into the ground and lay helpless on his huge belly. Pete ran in to about 10 feet, and that time he found the earhole. The bull died without a struggle.
He was a very good elephant. One tusk weighed 99 pounds, the other 96.
“But I’ll never kill another,” Pete told me. “This one had to be destroyed, and if we had not done it the game warden would have. But that huge majestic animal was too awesome in death for me to want to do it again. And when I learned that the Masai will not eat elephant meat, and that the great carcass must go to the hyenas and vultures, I felt even worse.”
Steve was taking some good animals, including a buffalo that made the record book. And a couple of days after Pete shot the elephant he had the luck to come on a big bull eland. He went after it, got two quick shots as it ran off and hit it both times. The first shot broke a shoulder and should have put the animal down, but they had to follow him a mile before they got close enough to finish him off. He had 2924- inch horns, good enough to put him on the official Rowland Ward record list.
They came finally to the morning of March 21, the last day of the hunt, and Barrett was still without a buffalo. He and Jean and Henry got up at 3 :30, and at daybreak they were 55 miles from camp, in an area where they had seen buffalo but no shootable bulls.
They had made a small change in arrangements that day, a change that was to have unbelievable consequences.
Ethia, one of the two old and experienced trackers and gunbearers who regularly went with Henry—the other was named Gatia—had eaten too much meat from Steve’s buffalo the night before and was too sick to hunt that morning-
Henry replaced him with David, a young native in his 20s, who was just getting started as a gunbearer. He was mission-educated and spoke some English, but had had very little experience, and what was coming was to prove tragically too much for him.
They parked the hunting car at the foot of a hill that offered a lookout, and Henry and Pete started to climb it. Henry reached the crest while Pete was only halfway up. He took one quick look, wheeled and came back with a wide grin on his face.
“How would you like a lion?” he asked. “There’s a bloody good one over there. Black mane and all. You’re in luck, maybe.”
They hurried back to the Toyota and drove around the hill to the foot of a low ridge where they’d have scattered clumps of brush to cover the stalk. They left Jean there in the car.
Pete took the .458, Henry carried his .470 double. He gave Gatia a 7mm bolt-action Brno belonging to Pete and handed Pete’s Browning over-and-under 12-gauge shotgun, with buckshot in both barrels, to David. The bearers would carry these as backup guns only. Poolman did not intend that the two blacks would use either the rifle or the shotgun, but the extra guns would be there in case trouble developed at close quarters.
They got within 125 yards with no difficulty. From there the ridge was open, grown over with short yellow grass and strewn with boulders. There was no cover even to crawl through, and the lion saw them coming. Fie was standing broadside, an arrogant, magnificent looking cat, and Pete didn’t need to be told not to wait any longer. But just as he was ready to shoot the lion started to run.
Pete had had buck fever many times in his life and had it hard, but it had not bothered him once on that African hunt. He concluded afterward, however, that it hit him then. Certainly, he didn’t make as good a shot as he could have. The lion was behind a bush before he could fire. When it came into sight again, it hesitated, and he got its shoulder in the sights and touched off.
“High,” Henry barked, and with that the lion really ran.
Pete sent two more fast shots after it before it went over the ridge, but they showed no effect and he was sure he had missed. Then Gatia and David, higher on the slope, started to yell in Swahili.
“He’s down,’’ Henry translated. “You clobbered him! Come on.”
They climbed and crossed the ridge quietly. The lion was lying on his belly with his back toward them, not more than 20 yards away. Pete had a strong feeling he was not dead. His position was wrong.
A year later, when Pete finally got a look at the skull, he learned all that will ever be known about what his shots had done. One of them had broken the cat’s lower right jaw.
It seems unlikely that that alone would have stopped the lion, and when he laid down to ambush his pursuers, he picked a poor spot. Barrett will always believe that another of his shots had gone into the body, possibly into the lungs, and prevented Simba from running off. But he’ll never be sure, for in the end hyenas tore the cat apart before he could be skinned.
Pete and Henry had crepte halfway down to him, when Pete stopped and started to bring his rifle up for another shot. Just then, Poolman said over his shoulder, “Congratulations!” and in the same instant, Pete saw the great maned head turn. The lion looked back at them and rolled as if to regain its feet. Then Poolman sprang in front of Pete to put himself between his client and danger, and blotted the cat out.
It all happened in a fraction of a second, and Barrett will never be clear on one point. He seems to recall that he fired from the hip as the cat rolled and before Henry leaped between them, but he can’t be sure. Gatia unloaded all the guns at the end, before he put them in the hunting car, but when Pete asked him later whether his had had an empty case in the chamber, the native could not remember.
Henry had been at Pete’s right and a step or two ahead. He and the two gunbearers were nearer to the lion than Pete was, and it could have gotten to them easier. But for some reason, it singled him out for the attack.
Because I was the one who had hurt him in the first place? Pete asked himself when it was all over. He’ll never know.
In any case, the cat had its sights set on Barrett and what it did was typical lion behavior. As John Kingsley-Heath, the Nairobi white hunter who was so savagely mauled by a wounded lion in 1961, said afterward, “Once Simba picks his victim he stays with it. A wounded leopard will rush from one member of a party to another, biting each in turn, leaving one and running for the next. A lion takes time to finish what he begins.”
Pete heard two shots from Henry’s .470, so close together they blurred into each other. Next, he saw Poolman bowled aside, saw his rifle go sailing through the air. Henry fell flat on his back at Pete’s right, and a crazy flicker of thought ran through Pete’s mind: When we get back to camp tonight, I’ll razz you plenty for lying there on your fanny while a lion grabs your client!
“I can only conclude that I had not yet had time to be scared,” he told me.
Looking back, he believes the lion was half dead at that point and running blindly for him. Henry had probably hit it both times. By then, it likely had three bullets in it, maybe four. But it was still 400 pounds of deadly fury.
It carried Pete backward six or eight feet as he fell. He landed on his side, lying across it, with his left forearm clamped in its jaws. He felt no pain, but he was aware of teeth crunching through the bones of his wrist.
He did the wrong thing instinctively. He grabbed the lion’s lower jaw with his right hand to keep it from closing its mouth. But then he recalls thinking, “He’ll bite your fingers off.” He yanked his hand away so fast that he cut the skin on the inside of his fingers against the lion’s front teeth.
Next, he saw Gatia come dodging in. The native shoved the muzzle of his rifle between the lion’s body and Pete’s and drove two shots into the cat’s spine within inches of the man’s back. The gun was so close that Pete felt the blast of concussion, and the jolting hammer-blows that went through the body of the lion. But the jaws had not relaxed on his arm, and he screamed, “Shoot him again !”
The third shot did it. He felt the jaws loosen and the heavy muscular body go slack under him. He had trouble getting his hand and watch strap untangled from the lion’s teeth, and when he pulled free he could not see the hand. It was turned back and the end of the arm bones protruded from the bloody stub that had been his wrist. Luckily the teeth had straddled the main artery and frayed but not severed it. Pete remembers mumbling to himself, “Well, at least I’ve got a stump left.” Then he rolled to his knees and looked around.
What he saw was sheer horror.
Just as the lion smashed into him and he started to fall, he had heard a shot and a muffled cry, and had seen Poolman throw up both arms and topple backward. Henry was lying a few feet away now, his chest and shirt front a mass of blood.
What had happened was almost too fantastic and dreadful to believe. As the lion knocked Henry off his feet and streaked past him, he had twisted around and grabbed it by the tail in a last-ditch attempt to keep it from getting at his client. It pulled him partway to his feet and into line with the young gunbearer David, and at that instant David fired a load of buckshot at point-blank range. It did not touch the lion, but it smashed into Henry’s chest and killed him instantly.
Pete crawled over to him, felt for a pulse and listened for his breathing, but he was dead.
From her place in the hunting car at the foot of the ridge, Jean had heard the lion roar (none of the others remembered hearing that, but she did), had heard the shots, seen her husband’s hat fly off and Henry fall backward. She came racing up the slope now and took charge, cool and capable.
David was hysterical, but she pulled him together and sent him hurrying down to the car for the medical kit. She washed Pete’s arm, poured on antiseptics, bound the hand back in place as best she could, and gave him a couple of codeine tablets.
He was in shock by then and he has no clear recollection of what happened next. He felt no pain, but he does remember a deadly fatigue.
“Some who have heard the story have asked whether we did the right thing,” he told me. “I don’t know. The decision was of necessity made by Gatia and David, and in the shock and horror of what had happened I believe they did the best they could.”
He did not lose consciousness, but he must have blacked out on his feet, for the next thing he remembered they were jolting along in the Toyota, with Jean supporting him and Gatia at the wheel.
“Where’s Henry?” he mumbled.
“Back there with David,” she told him.
The two blacks had talked the thing over in Swahili. Henry was a big man, between 220 and 240, and it was 300 yards to the hunting car. They had decided against trying to carry the body that distance. Maybe they were afraid to remove it until the police came. Instead they took it to the shade of a nearby tree, left David to keep hyenas and vultures away, and Gatia, who had had very little experience at driving (Jean had had none with a 4-wheel-drive vehicle) undertook the long rough trip back to camp.
Gatia tried to drive as fast as he could. A little man, about 5 feet 2, he could not sec over the front fender, and he hit rock after rock. The bumps were nervewracking, and Pete kept yelling “pa’le, pa’le,” thinking it was the Swahili word for slow. Actually, it meant “just then.” Pic should have been saying “po’le, po’le,” instead. Gatia kept pouring on coal and they kept hitting rocks.
Steve and Terry had gone out that morning to make a round of leopard baits. They would not be back yet, and that meant there would be nobody at camp who could operate the radio. But a young couple from Texas, Ron and Mary Cauble, were camped nearby, trapping and studying baboons as part of a research project in primate behavior. Gatia headed for their camp.
Pete’s wrist watch had stopped at 5:41, when the lion bit into it. It was three hours later when they reached the Caubles. That had been a pretty terrible three hours.
Ron and Mary took over. She contacted the Ker, Downey and Selby headquarters in Nairobi on the radio, and then Ron left to bring in Henry’s body, picking up a couple of native military police on the way.
At Oloitokitok, a few miles from the hunting camp, there was an emergency landing strip and a first-aid station manned by a competent Indian intern. Pete was driven there immediately. The safari firm had an aircraft and a doctor on the way at once, and everything humanly possible was done for him. At 1 o’clock that afternoon, about seven hours after the lion attacked, he was in the Nairobi Hospital.
Ron Cauble went out the next morning to have a look at the lion. He found most of it devoured by hyenas. The only thing he could salvage was the skull, and it was from him that Pete learned, many months later, that one of his shots had broken the lower jaw on the right side.
The unlucky David was arrested, and Kenya police authorities made a painstaking investigation, but in the end Henry’s death was ruled entirely accidental and the young gun bearer was exonerated. It was, however, an accident that in all likelihood would not have happened with an older and more experienced man, such as Ethia.
Pete’s Browning was held by the police for a time, but he got it back through the safari firm after four months.
He spent 18 days in the hospital, and then flew home. His wrist healed surprisingly well, and although his fingers will always be a bit numb, he recovered about three-fourths of the use of his hand.
“I’ll never forget that agonizing minute as the lion grabbed me and bore me to the ground,” Barrett says today. “I will never forget, either, the sight of Henry Poolman springing in front of me to take the attack himself. I’ll always figure he saved my life at the expense of his own. He was one of the best, that man Poolman.”
A few months after the tragedy, the East Africa Professional Hunters Association set up an educational fund for Henry’s daughter Adelaide, in memory of her father. Pete Barrett turned over to that fund all his proceeds from the story.
“It’s a story I never expected to tell,” he says, “but so many inaccurate versions have been circulated that I decided it was time to set the record straight. This is how it really happened.”
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White Hunters re-creates the legendary big-game safaris led by Selous and Bell and the daring ventures of early hunters into unexplored territories. Witnesses to the richest wildlife spectacle on the earth, these hunters were the first conservationists. Hard-drinking, infatuated with risk, and careless in love, they inspired Hemingway’s stories and movies with Clark Gable and Gregory Peck.