length of time,” wrote Rushby in his memoir, No More the Tusker, “it
develops an almost supernatural cunning.^4 This often makes the hunting
down and killing of such a lion a lengthy and difficult task.”
There is a related phenomenon among predators, large and small, that
is politely termed “surplus killing,” but which manifests as a kind of
spontaneous, frenzied slaughter. This is not what the Njombe lions were
engaged in, but lions have been known to do it. So have leopards, tigers,
wolves, hyenas, polar bears, and killer whales, among others. Shortly
after the Njombe man-eaters were killed, one of Rushby’s colleagues
observed such an incident at the Kruger National Park, 250 miles east of
the Sterkfontein valley. Colonel James Stevenson-Hamilton was working
as a warden there when he witnessed what he described as a “massacre of
baboons” by a pride of lions. Apparently, a baboon troop had been
approaching a water hole and failed to notice the lions napping nearby.
The lions awoke and two lionesses rose and quietly hid themselves by the
trail. When they leaped out, the baboons panicked and fled—directly into
the larger body of lions. “The baboons were apparently too terrified even
to try to escape up any of the surrounding trees,” wrote Stevenson-
Hamilton, “and hid with their faces in their hands while the lions simply
struck them down right and left with blows from their paws.”^5
The colonel might as well have been describing peasants falling before
berserkers. The most painful detail in this anecdote is the baboons’
resignation: with no hope of escape, they fashioned a refuge of last resort
from the darkness in their own hands. The image is so poignant, in part,
because those hands could so easily be ours. Perhaps it was the possibility
of such catastrophes that kept the Sterkfontein baboons from fleeing that
night when Brain frightened them so badly: better to lose one or two than
risk the whole troop.
Even from millions of years away, it is upsetting to visualize the fate
of a family of australopithecines caught out on the veld, a bit too far from
a climbable tree, and it wouldn’t have had to happen often to put a chill
on everyone in the vicinity. To this day, entire districts have been
paralyzed by the presence of a single man-eater, to the point that life-