It was the vultures that gave the game away. Dozens of them, hunched in the leafless trees like obscene fruit. As we drew closer the dry, pure air of Tsavo national park was poisoned by the gut-churning stench of death.
There were six carcasses. All has been small elephants and they had fallen where the poachers had surprised them, on their way to drink at a waterhole. One had collapsed in a kneeling position, as it lay now, its huge ears still spread as in life, a grotesque parody of an elephant with its trunk chopped off and tusks hacked out.
I could see the holes where the poachers' bullets had struck. They had been dead only two weeks but a fortnight in the sun had reduced them to shrunken tents of red hide, splashed with vulture droppings and hollowed by hyenas.
A week later the same gang killed another six elephants 20km away, but this time their luck ran out. As they made for their hideout in the Kulalu hills they were spotted from the air by Joe Kioko, the park's acting head warden. Within 20 minutes his anti-poaching patrols were in pursuit and, in the fierce shoot-out which followed, two poachers were shot dead and three captured. All were Somalis.
Tsavo is the largest national park in East Africa, a magnificent wilderness the size of Wales. Last year it should have been celebrating its 40th anniversary as Kenya's finest elephant sanctuary. Instead its herds have been fleeting from the most savage poaching onslaught in the country's history.
"What we are witnessing in Africa," says Dr Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the world's leading elephant biologist, "is the greatest animal tragedy of this century. Make no mistake. The fate of the elephant will be decided by what happens in Tsavo."
When I last came to Tsavo in 1978 there seemed to be elephants everywhere. Now this immense land appeared utterly deserted. From the Yatta plateau to Mtito Andei; from Kilaguni through the Ngulia valley and all the way down to Mudanda Rock, I saw not a single elephant. Worse still, there was no sign of the dustbin-sized footprints, no green boulders of dung left on the roads by the wandering herds. Only an occasional bleached bone, too big even for the hyenas to break open, to hint at the tragedy being enacted here.
Only when I left the tourist lodge at Voi and followed the Voi river down to the Kanderi swamp did I find them. There, miraculously, a herd of about 150 had gathered to feed on the lush swamp grasses. Surprisingly, there were still a few bulls among them with good tusks, weighing perhaps 45lb per side; but also an unnaturally high number of youngsters - orphan Dumbos with big round ears and absurdly small trunks, hinting at the large number of adult cows which must have fallen to the poacher's bullets.
As I watched, more elephants came striding in from the bush until there were perhaps 350 feeding peacefully. Only here, deep in the park and close to the well-used tourist circuits, did they feel safe.
"Enjoy it while you can," said my guide. "You'll never see its like again. You're looking at about 30 per cent of what's left of the East Tsavo herds." Only last year, he said, he had been seeing herds 600-strong. But the poachers had taken a terrible toll. In the past six months, at least 500 elephants have been shot, leaving another 300 helpless youngsters for the lions.
I saw no more live elephants that day; but all down the road to the Sala Gate, I passed bones and skulls - all missing their tusks - where the poachers had been busy. In Tsavo such victims are known as "roadsiders" - animals shot from vehicles - with the implication that corrupt park officials have also been deeply involved in the ivory racket. But the great mass of killings are carried out by gangs of "shifta" - Somali bandits whose work is all too plain to see. They carry automatic weapons - G3s and AK47s - and their trade-mark is a cluster of corpses: whole elephant families gunned down in groups of up to a dozen animals.
Now, in most of East Tsavo, the dead outnumber the living. In three days I counted 35 carcasses, all with their tusks hacked out, all killed in the previous six weeks. One animal, although hit eight times, had managed to hobble away, dragging a shattered leg across 400 yards of rocky ground, only to die within yards of the river it had been trying to reach. Another, a cow elephant, had been shot in the act of giving birth and lay with her dead calf beside her.
At the same time, in all that immense land, I saw only another 11 live elephants. Among them was a solitary adult female with five bewildered youngsters - all that remained of a 400-strong herd seen here in January.
It was primarily to protect these huge migratory herds, among the biggest in Africa, that Tsavo was created in 1948. Its 8,000 square miles of arid bush was of little use to man but to the elephants it held out the best hope of survival in a shrinking world. Here they could still wander freely across the vast, dusty face of Africa. At least, that was the dream.
From the very beginning, the park was plagued by poachers. In those days it was the local Wakamba and Waliangulu tribesmen - skilled hunters who entered the park to pick off the big tuskers with poisoned arrows. Tsavo, the Wakamba word for "slaughter," was already living up to its name. In 1970 it suffered a terrible drought which lasted for five years. By the end it had killed at least 9,000 elephants and a far greater menace now cast its shadow across the park.
For years, the price of ivory had remained stable at around ú1 per pound. In 1969 prices suddenly tripled and in 1972 they tripled again - almost a tenfold increase in three years. The boom was almost certainly engineered by a few big international dealers, holding back their stocks so that, overnight, ivory became a commodity, like gold, to be salted away in a bank vault as a hedge against inflation.
The word spread swiftly to the poachers in the bush and the ivory rush was on. From Kenya the illegal trade spread rapidly into neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania and then on until it reached into every part of the elephants' range.
By 1974 Tsavo was under siege. The situation had taken a sinister new turn with the arrival of Somali poachers armed with semi-automatic weapons from the war-torn Horn of Africa. The well-organised field force led by David Sheldrick, the park's redoutable head warden, was stretched to its limits. Then, in 1976, the Kenya National Parks Board was merged with the Game Department, a move viewed with deep suspicion by conservationists and with good reason. Even then, a taint of corruption hung about the Game Department. For the smaller but incorrupt parks department it was the beginning of the end, Sheldrick was removed from Tsavo and during the disruption that followed the poachers enjoyed a carnival.
One of Sheldrick's last acts as warden was to produce a report on ivory poaching in Tsavo, underlining his concern over the growing power of Somalis. "Their sudden appearance in large numbers is almost certainly political," he wrote prophetically. "Claiming by right of occupation what they failed to acquire by force of arms, they have infiltrated in large numbers by design and pose a very serious threat to the Tsavo park."
Just how serious a threat became clear in February last year when Iain Douglas-Hamilton organised an aerial survey of Tsavo's elephants at the request of Perez Olindo, director of Kenya's Wildlife Conservation and Management Department. Olindo is highly regarded by conservationists. In September he was awarded the $50,000 J. Paul Getty prize for Conservation, and his appointment by President Moi the previous year was warmly welcomed in Nairobi. Olindo knew that another dramatic upsurge in the price of ivory had triggered a fresh spate of killings in the park, and the survey confirmed his worst fears. The Tsavo herds had crashed from 17,487 to 4,327 - a 75 per cent decline since the last major survey 16 years earlier in 1972.
For conservationists the situation had a depressing air of dÄjê vu. Back in 1975 a major scandal had erupted when it was revealed that members of President Kenyatta's family were involved in illegal ivory trading, with the active connivance of some of the highest officials in the Game Department. When Moi became President in 1978, one of his first acts was to remove those officials.
Afterwards, it seemed for a time that poaching in Kenya had been brought under control. But in the early Eighties the killing of rhino and elephant began again and has continued unabated. The figures tell the story. In the past 10 years Kenya has lost almost all its rhinos and 85 per cent of its elephants.
Two questions must be asked: Who is killing Kenya's elephants? Who is to blame for it?
In Tsavo there is no doubt that the current wave of poaching is almost entirely the work of Somali bandits - albeit with the help of Kenyan traders in Mombasa and Malindi and the suspected collusion of corrupt officials in the Ministry of Wildlife and Tourism.
Reports of the actual numbers of poachers vary. Some talk of bandit gangs 90-strong roaming the park but this is almost certainly an exaggeration. Mostly they operate in groups of half a dozen or maybe 15, half of them armed and the rest employed as carriers. Some are ethnic Somalis with Kenyan nationality but many are from Somalia itself, including army deserters and guerrillas trained in bush warfare.
They move on foot inside the park, living off the land and indiscriminately killing animals for food. A giraffe was found recently with only its tongue cut out for meat. The rest had been left for the vultures. The gangs sleep in thickets by day, leaving a guard on watch up a tree, and cook only at night when their camp fire smoke cannot be seen. When surprised by anti-poaching patrols they always make for the hills, suggesting that this is where they have their main hideouts and lookout post.
At dusk they move out to follow tracks or stake out waterholes. For the elephants the most dangerous times are the nights of the full moon. Modern weapons are cheap in East Africa: 500 Kenya shillings (about ú17) will buy an automatic rifle in Somalia, giving the poachers a clear advantage over the anti-poaching patrols who must still rely on old-fashioned .303s.
Then tusks are hacked out with axes and hidden in wart-hog burrows until a big enough cache is ready to be taken out of the park. Then they are carried on foot as far as the main Mombasa to Nairobi road which divides Tsavo in two. There are no fences and the area is so huge that it is easy to make a roadside rendez-vous with a middleman - especially since the Somalis also dominate the long-distance trucking business.
The poachers receive about ú9 per kilo for their tusks, depending on the size and quality of the ivory. Much of the haul still passes through the hands of Asian and Arab traders in Mombasa, Malindi and Lamu, whence it is smuggled across the Indian Ocean by dhow to Dubai.
About a dozen big-time dealers are involved, plus a number of smaller operators. Although most are known to the police, they are also extremely rich and well connected. So far, though some traders have been pulled in for questioning, none has been put out of business.
Over the past year, increasing numbers of tusks have also been finding their way north to Somalia. There, elephant hunting is banned as its own herds have shrunk to some 4,000 animals. In 1987 no ivory left Somalia but reports began circulating which suggested that it was building up stocks of allegedly "confiscated" ivory which in fact had been poached in Kenya with the active encouragement of the government.
In June 1988 Somalia announced its intention to export 5,000 tusks. Then, last November, the figure was increased to 8,000. Since this represented 4,000 elephants - the equivalent of Somalia's entire national herd - cynics could be forgiven for doubting that this was Somali ivory. In fact 3,000 additional tusks almost certainly came from Tsavo.
Many Kenyans are now wondering if the slaughter of their elephants is a deliberate attempt by the Somalis to destabilise the country. The Somalis have never renounced their claims to large tracts of northern Kenya. Even so, such theories still sounded far-fetched - until November, when the London-based "New African" magazine published a letter apparently signed by Somalia's President, Mohamed Siad Barre. Dated March 19, 1987, it authorised "Comrades Omer Hassan Khayre and Hussein Barre Hassan to bring elephant tusks from Kenya to Somalia". The Somali embassy in Nairobi's quickly issued a denial but the magazine's editors, Alan Rake, insisted that the letter was genuine and that it had come to him from a "leak in the office of President Barre himself".
Kenya's thriving, wildlife-based tourist industry is the country's main source of revenue, currently worth ú200 million a year. Kill the elephants, scare away the visitors and the country's economy would lie in ruins.
It was therefore with some dismay that conservationists heard George Muhoho, Kenya's minister for Wildlife and Tourism, claim improved efficiency in protecting the game. He was speaking at a press conference in Nairobi on August 29 last, just two days after Somali poachers had shot dead three rangers in the Kora national reserve. He also admitted that poachers had shot 92 elephants since May (the true figures were much higher) and expressed "regrets" over the killings, but assured his audience that the affected areas were safe for visitors.
This was too much for Richard Leakey, the distinguished palaeontologist who is chairman of the East African Wildlife Society. Two days later he unleashed a furious attack on Muhoho's failure to contain the poaching, accused his ministry of "lip service" to the cause of conservation and challenged him to tell the truth about the killing of the elephants.
Next day Muhoho struck back. Why, he asked, should the East African Wildlife Society doubt the figures he had issued, which showed that Kenya still had 22,000 elephants? And he challenged Leakey to name any "high or low-ranking person" involved in poaching.
Leakey was not to be silenced. The figure of 22,000, he said, was "misleading". At the end of last year there were no more than 20,000 elephants and possibly a great many fewer. Then he dropped his bombshell. The minister, he said, had already received a confidential list naming people inside his own ministry who were involved in poaching. The document had been presented to Muhoho more than a month earlier and had been gathering dust ever since.
"I am reliably informed that the matter is being investigated by the police and as such it is the minister who should name names," Leakey declared. "I know the minister got a copy of the document. I did not get one."
Muhoho's only response was to denounce Leakey for his "cheeky white mentality", implying - quite wrongly - that it is only Kenya's whites who are concerned about protecting wildlife.
For Muhoho, a former Jesuit priest and the brother of President Kenyatta's widow, Mama Ngina, it was a disastrous performance. But at least the acrimonious exchange with Leakey had put the crisis on centre stage, sparking off a national debate over the fate of the elephants and the chronic inability of the Ministry of Wildlife and Tourism to bring the poachers to justice.
"How many more rangers must we lose before we realise that the threat affects us and not just our wildlife?" wrote Hilary Ng'weno, Kenya's most distinguished journalist, in the "Nairobi Weekly Review". "What should be done is certainly more than the mere issuing of brave press statements. If it is true, as the government itself admits, that some members of the staffs of national parks, game reserves and the game department are colluding with poachers, then they should not only be sacked but arrested and prosecuted for their crimes."
Meanwhile the poachers were becoming even bolder. On September 5, a tourist was shot and badly wounded when bandits held up and robbed a safari minibus in Meru national park. On September 17, after President Moi had ordered all national park officials to shoot poachers on sight, a truck carrying an eight-man patrol of Kenya's paramilitary General Service Unit (GSU) was ambushed by 50 armed bandits on rangelands adjoining Tsavo West national park. In the four-hour gun battle which followed, two GSU men were killed while several others were injured. On October 4, poachers killed 11 elephants within three miles of Hilton's famous Salt Lick Tourist Lodge. And on November 1, in their most provocative act to date, they walked into Meru park and killed five rare white rhinos.
When Moi heard the news from Meru he hit the roof. This time the poachers and their protectors had made a bad mistake. By now 10 game wardens and rangers had been sacked and dozens of others hauled in for questioning.
The tide was turning. In September things had begun to improve when a new man, Joe Kioko, a senior warden from Nairobi, was put in charge of Tsavo East national park, a move which brought the Anti-Poaching Unit their first much-needed victory in the elephant war. On November 16, Kioko's men finally caught up with a Somali gang in Tsavo East, killing two poachers and wounding three more.
In Tsavo's dry bush country the elephants are the linchpin of the ecosystem. They open up the dense Commiphora thorn thickets, allowing grasslands to spring up where herds of oryx, impala, zebras and antelope may graze.
As the grasslands spread, the water table rises, with the roots of the perennial grasses reaching down 20ft and more to break up the hard pan created by permanent scrub. Elephants destroy trees, it is true; but they plant many others, carrying the seeds far and wide in their droppings. And whenever they roam, their tusking and mud-wallowing create waterholes where other animals can drink.
Now, with the elephants' demise, the scrub is returning, and with it the tsetse fly - killer of cattle. Seasonal streams are drying up. Waterholes are disappearing. Even the ancient elephant trails, the oldest roads in Africa, are growing fainter as the bush closes in.
Even if poaching stopped tomorrow, it would take the herds years to recover. Dr Joyce Poole, who has been studying Kenya's elephants for 13 years, has produced some alarming evidence pointing to the collapse of the elephants' social structure. Male elephants do not normally begin to mate until they are at least 30 years old. And since it is the older bulls which carry the heaviest ivory, they have been the poachers' prime target. When Tsavo's elephants were counted in February 1988, only one out of more than 2,000 animals was a mature breeding bull elephant.
At the same time, many of the old cows which govern the elephants' matriarchal society have also been killed for their tusks, resulting in leaderless families and orphaned calves.
"These elephants are losing their knowledge of the park, where to find food, water and sanctuary," says Poole. "They are losing their whole culture." Furthermore, she says, any calf under two years of age which loses its mother to poachers is itself doomed, while even those under 10 have only a 50/50 chance of survival.
The killing fields of Tsavo are a microcosm of what is happening to elephants all over Africa. For years the world ivory market has treated Africa as if it were a bottomless pit filled with elephants. Now they have been slaughtered to the point where, if the killing continues, they will all be gone in five years. Then the unthinkable will become a reality: a world without elephants.
Since 1986, when CITES, the Covention on International Trade in Endangered Species, began monitoring the world ivory trade, only 22 per cent has come from legitimate sources. The rest, equivalent to 89,000 dead elephants, came from animals killed by poachers. Understandably, the Kenyans deeply resent outside criticism. President Moi and men of good faith like Perez Olindo know what is at stake and are doing their best to put things right.
There are now strong hints that Moi - one of Africa's most conservation-minded leaders - is planning a complete shakeout. There is talk of the national parks becoming a new parastatal body, self-financing and run by a board of trustees as in the old days, and with a tough new anti-poaching force re-equipped with practical help from Britain. But there is very little time.
"In most of Africa the ivory trade has driven the elephant downward," says Iain Douglas-Hamilton. "Too many loopholes allow poached ivory to get into world trade. The whole system is out of control." Douglas-Hamilton would like to see a moratorium on the trade to give the herds time to recover. So would Daphne Sheldrick, the widow of David Sheldrick, who spent his life trying to protect the Tsavo elephants.
"Every piece of ivory is a haunting memory of a once-proud and majestic animal who was a member of a close-knit and loving family," she says. "The elephant is perhaps the only creature beside ourselves with the ability to understand the concept of death and who has to suffer unspeakable agony to yield up its tusks for trinkets. That is a high price to pay for ivory and the world should want no part of it."
