Geoffrey Williams's Nandi bear sighting near Sirgoit Rock, Uasin Gishu plateau, Kenya (c. 1905)

The Uasin Gishu plateau, in the highlands of western Kenya. Around 1905. The Nandi Expedition had just ended, and the area was essentially unsettled by Europeans. The Afrikaner trek under Jan van Rensburg would not reach Sergoit Hill until 1908.

Geoffrey Champneys Howard Williams was a British settler, the son of Sir Ralph Champneys Williams. He had arrived in East Africa around 1905. In later years he lived at Kinangop and Nandi Hills, served as an Intelligence Officer with the East Africa Mounted Rifles, and became President of the Convention of Associations in Nairobi.

Williams and a cousin had camped near a place he called "the Mataye". Now they were marching toward Sirgoit Rock. Then Williams saw "a large animal sitting up on its haunches no more than 30 yards away. Its attitude was just that of a bear at the 'Zoo' asking for buns."

It was dark and heavily built. Its forequarters and forelegs were thickly furred. Its hindquarters were comparatively bare. The head was long and pointed, "exactly like a bear's", with small ears. The tail was practically unnoticeable. "I should say it must have been nearly 5 feet high," he wrote. Larger than the bears he had seen in zoos.

Then it moved. It "dropped forward and shambled away towards the Sirgoit with what my cousin always describes as a sort of sideways canter." Williams fired as it was disappearing among the rocks. He missed. The animal stopped, and turned to look back.

July 1912. Williams published "An unknown animal on the Uasingishu" in The Journal of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society. He added stories he had heard in the region. He wrote that he "was twice warned by the people not to sleep with my tent door open for fear of the 'Shivuverre,' which they describe as a nocturnal beast something like a hyena only infinitely larger and very savage." Another tale told of a shivuverre that climbed onto a hut roof, broke through and killed everyone inside. People later killed it.

There was no official inquiry into the sighting. But colonial naturalists took up the wider mystery of the Nandi bear, the animal also called the Chemosit, Kerit, Koddoelo, Ngoloko or Duba. C. W. Hobley published "Some unidentified beasts" in the same journal in 1913. A. Blayney Percival followed with "The Chemosit" in August 1914. In 1932 the British Natural History Museum agreed with R. I. Pocock. The reports, they concluded, were misidentified spotted hyenas.

The hyena idea has its logic. A hyena's sloping back and lurching gait could suggest a sideways canter. Others pointed to the honey badger, or to baboons and aardvarks, though Williams reportedly ruled out both. Then came the bolder theories. Andrews in 1923 and Louis Leakey in the 1930s proposed a surviving chalicothere, an idea Jacobs rejected in 2000. Karl Shuker has reviewed an African bear, a giant short-faced hyena and a giant baboon as candidates. He also suggests that "the Nandi bear" was created by "the erroneous lumping together" of sightings of several different animals.

No track. No hair. No photograph. Just two men on a march and one missed shot. Yet the account is usually described as the earliest known European eyewitness sighting of the Nandi bear, and Bernard Heuvelmans quoted it in On the Track of Unknown Animals. Sirgoit Rock is now Sergoit Hill, a golf and wildlife resort, and local Keiyo and Marakwet communities treat it as a shrine.