“Look,” he stopped us dead in our jaunt and pointed to a clearing in the spindly high prairie grass that bore powder-white soda sand. He smiled jubilantly with his brown-flecked teeth and swatted a fly from his forehead. “Lion tracks. And dey are barey fresh.” We knitted our eyebrows; suddenly our casual early morning stroll through the national park savanna seemed to us to have gone on long enough already. Hadn’t we seen enough anyhow? If you count one hyena and one stray warthog. Naturally at this point, I stopped looking for the overly aggressive Egyptian cobras our young guide was just telling us about (“as beeg as your arm”) in the grass and started searching the bushes for lions. This walk was really going swell. But Kelvin, our guide, had that ethereal, possessed look in his eyes that the locals get when talking about the great animals that walk these grasslands, and said with a hypnotized, nonchalant smile, “Lion still here. We heard voice of lion in staff quarters last night.”
Back on the public porch at camp, we were headed back to our canvas bungalow, when she routed us off at the stairs. “And?” she said with an air of mischief in her accent, “how was the morning walk?” She was a white woman from Botswana. Her hair short, blonde-grey and wild as if constantly in the wind. And the strangest color eyes. A piercing, light orange with very small pupils going back into themselves. Her smile, wide with overly pronounced canines. It was as if she could smell the apprehension on us as soon as we made it back to the camp. “we saw lion tracks.” She smiled with one side of her mouth using mostly her right incisor. “Yes. I think she is still around. None of the animals have returned. Normally there are huge herds of them moving through here in the morning.” (and Kelvin told us they were just sleeping…) A lioness had killed a zebra next to camp the night before we arrived, she had told us before we left for the walk. The staff said they could hear the hyenas whooping laugh all night as they heralded the kill. “it was…quite beautiful really.” she said, still with that same not-quite-right smile. We asked her if there were often incidents with the lions. She nodded mysteriously, paused as if out of pious respect to the sacred force being discussed and then reported a few with great animation and wild energy in her eyes. “At my old camp in Botswana, one of them got my guide. He was protecting a client during a hunting trip. The client shot the lion but only wounded it and…it came. My guide’s gun misfired. He had the gun between him and the thing but it got him all up the arms. After we shot it, you know what I did? I plugged the holes in his arms full of tampons. They expand, you know. When they finally airlifted him, the doctor asked “who has the sense of humor? Lady, you saved his life.” After that they made tampons a requirement for every emergency kit at local camps. And he got to wear the talon around his neck according to African tradition. You can’t wear it if you just shoot a lion. It has to be up close and personal.” Her eyes were aflame now and awake. She turned them toward her holy land, the pridelands before us, their grassy flats empty as if in curtsy to the presence of their tawny queen. And then there was the ridge marking the edge of the Great Rift Valley rising like alter smoke above the fields in the distance. “Its funny, all the tourists laugh about the spears the staff carry with them. Some of them intently request a gun to be carried on walks or at night. They don’t understand that these guys couldn’t hit one with a bullet if it were right in front of them. But a spear or a bow and arrow? One shot, quick like lightning. That’s all it takes. Quite amazing really. That’s the kind of weapon they know best. When I was 14 growing up in the bush in Botswana, my father bought me a gun. We had cattle and the lions used to come through our village and down into our herd and stables. I was so excited, you know. Me and the local guys, we stayed watch that night, me with my gun and them with their old spears. I thought, how much better am I than them, when those old lions come down. Sure enough that night the lions came. And when they did my gun went this way and I went that way. The local guys had them out of there with their spears in a matter of minutes. Har har. They used that story against me for years.”
We were riveted. But our guides weren’t and they made a bit of a stirring behind us as the morning was wearing on. She brandished her canines in the pure joy of telling and opened her eyes a little wider for a moment. “They are smart. They know. They know they are in human territory. They stay out of the way and the Maasai villages as much as they can. And when they cross through here in the night, they generally don’t make a sound. They even know when hunting season starts and ends. I think they can smell the guns.” Her complete possession by this powerful, amber-eyed soul of an animal and the ever-forgiving grass lands it haunted was transparent by now and she appeared almost trembling with the heat of it. Her orange lion eyes contracted in the morning sun as we shook and said goodbye. Even her ears covered with the fur of her fair hair looked to twitch as we walked to the truck. So uncannily similar did she seem to her animal spirit captor that I would have believed her to be a shape shifter, walking dusk and dawn the line between their world and ours. Following the thread of fearful respect that runs between those who share this grassy corridor. Between human and lion, in these parts each will kill the other without remorse and without ceremony. Such is the agreement. But both in silence bow to the might of their opponent. And lay watching one another perpetually through the high grass.
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