Thursday, March 24, 2011

St. Anthony's secret

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and it was only out of polite obligation that we didn’t cancel on our new friend Jonas. But went we did. And as the equatorial sun moved toward afternoon, we made our way down the dusty red road out of town. It was true, a more beautiful day you would be hard pressed to find the whole worldwide. Sunny and breezy with shadows just now starting to flicker over the road. Soon we were leaving our hilly haven far behind and descending down into the heat of the open African bush.

I had to admit, I was not at all prepared. Startled even. St. Anthony’s school was a few squat brick structures with holes for doors wide open to the rolling grasslands surrounding. Sand, paling in the sun, covered everything in view. It had become hot and sweat was on our backs. They came to meet us in the neck of the path after we turned off the road - a whole pack of them, faces turned upward into a burning sun and big baby-toothed gaps for smiles. Their little hands reaching up to us, clasping our fingers and thumbing our shirts. What was left of their too large, dusty old clothes were drooping down their chests and off their shoulders. All sets of curious eyes were on us and we were - for the moment - the very center of the universe. Expressive little sounds replaced words and signaled their excitement. “How are you?” they signed.

All were deaf and none could speak. A few had known speech as small children and from them you could sometimes catch a word in their sounds, like “mama”. Some had been deaf from birth. Untreated malaria or other fevers had claimed the hearing of the rest and for an unlucky few, took other pieces of the brain too. Uganda had too many hearing and speaking children to educate and to-be adults to find work for already, so it had no use for these children. Their parents didn’t know what else to do with them or how to communicate with them. So they were sent here - a small school for the deaf funded by small donations of churchgoers and what little guilt-money the government would drop. Orphans of functional society. This Sunday in particular had been a very special day - parent visiting day. Out of 36 children, 6 parents came.

But this did not keep them from smiling this afternoon. Within a few steps of our arrival, we were mobbed by children, and all our hands actively held. As we took a tour of the school, we were flanked by barefoot escorts who were walking through the brush in order to stay right at our sides. We saw the vegetable gardens where they worked to raise a little money of their own and the well that had been overrun with red mud. We saw the bunkbed dorms where they slept, mosquito nets full of holes and little old suitcase at the foot of each bed not much bigger than a lunchbox or just a few plastic bags - their belongings were not so numerous as to require much more. We saw the classrooms where they learned to write and to sign. More importantly, they were learning small trades and skills - ones that could perhaps someday allow them an income for themselves. Every last child knew how to work - garden, carry large jugs of water, lift a spade as soon as they were able. We took group pictures of them and loved to see themselves afterward - marked by a series of signs we didn’t understand and subtle squeals. We let them play with whatever things we had on us - an umbrella, a ponytail holder, a watch - and all were of immeasurable fascination and enjoyment. And then, we all went out back to play.

What kind of things can one play in a big empty field when no one can hear or speak? Answer = almost anything. The favorite game when the mzungus came was to be swung around by the wrists so that their little feet were airborn and their heads thrown back in happiness. Some of the older boys had set up a hurdle of sorts made out of sticks and they were competing jumping over it. There were backflips and handstands and cartwheels, ranging from impressive gymnastics to imitative tumbling and somersaulting in the grass by the little ones. These were the things you can practice when you don’t have toys or Tvs or sports equipment. In an effort to divert a fight between four children who wanted to hold my only two hands, I started ring around the rosie but without the song - they would just watch me eagerly for when it was ready to “fall down”.  Oh this, this was a good game. And it showed on their faces - exploding with excitement and suspense, fixed on my every move so as to leap into the air when it was time to go round again. With children, it seems that one little smiling face can sometimes expand to three times its normal size when having fun. And African children especially get these huge happy eyes and this incredible irrepressible expression - that when fixed on you is perhaps the greatest gift anyone ever gave you. Nothing was too simple to be thoroughly explored and enjoyed. And when that got boring, something else would surely present itself, in whatever form the spindly African bush and its white visitors would provide. They rarely cried when scraped - which happened often in bare feet. Instead some would cry sporatically in an exaggerated fashion in order to be picked up and held. For these young ones, being held in the arms of an adult no doubt happened rarely if ever. So we obliged them, we the big white santa clauses coming to town.  Yes, we were the headlining entertainment for the day. And tomorrow, surely there would be something else, if you knew how to look for it.

Soon it was time to go. The evening storms were coming and could be heard roiling in the distance. Time to make the long walk back up the hill before dusk. Goodbye was a non-event. No cries or fits,  just a smile and a wave. Loss was normal, goodbyes quite usual and everyday attachments far too fragile to fuss about. Come back soon, said Father Anthony, one of the three hearing and speaking adults helping run the school. Yes, we said. Couldn’t wait.

Three hours earlier, I had arrived, broken my own heart over the scene and cried quietly all over their little heads. Children of a society that never wanted to know them, who didn’t even have the words to express what that must feel like. No toys, no parents, no clothes or shoes to ease the pain. But when I left, I dare say, I felt quite cheerful. Quite happy indeed. They had infected me. Set me straight for that second. Shared their secret, one that not even most poor Ugandans knew. A secret that we could never fully unravel or take home with us. A gift from your God to his “forsaken” that none of the “saved” could know. That life is not worth waiting for. Promises not worth making. Comfort and convenience not worth knowing. The future not worth planning. Because without all those things, even without hearing, the metric system of life measures only in moments. These ones. Right. Now. Not even memories are worth more than a few shillings. Life is pennies in a pond - out of reach as currency but so very pretty when the sun catches them like that under those gliding, glittering ripples.

Make it Rain

It came like all storms seem to come in Africa. Swift and billowing. A fierce, rebel storm in the middle of the dry season, prodded on by the hot days in the lowlands. It was breathing heavy down our necks all afternoon, that cool, fat air that always comes before a storm. The thunder was on a constant, low roll in the distance. We were plodding along on our way to get chips and beans down the street when it came in on us in a huge black wave, dropping steaming streams of rain just a few miles away. We picked up the pace and hussled toward our destination, reaching it just before it rolled over us like a steamroller. We watched from under the tin roof. The streets cleared instantly. The rain was like water over a broken dam, spitting spray when it hit the earth with a vengence. The late evening sun went missing in a ditch somewhere and the red mud started to ebb in ripples down the street. Lightning ripped the sky open every minute or two and the whole of Africa seemed to step away to make room for it. No artificial light threatened its reign and the village was dark. No one could speak and no other sound could be heard over the deafening roar of pouring rain on the tin roof. The spray threatened every corner of the room like a guard dog through a fence full of holes. Leaks sprung like bathwater from the cracks. Small crowds of people were crowded together silently under the roof, randoms who had been caught on their way past. For more than half an hour we waited like hostages in the most wonderful storm we’ve seen yet. Happily frozen in time and silently suspended from our lives. We couldn’t speak so we just smiled.

Friday, March 18, 2011

The Hills are Alive

We met them on the border between Uganda and Rwanda. On a dusty dirt road that wound through those hills- rolling, plump hills that were crowned with the most glorious green.

We had climbed in our tank tops and our rubbery hiking boots up the hill from the little market port where we left our canoes. Lake Bunyonyi cooled under a blanket of mist below us. We had hiked for some time toward the border, a ruddy and jovial bunch bursting with nearly every first world flavor - American, English, Australian, Czech, Slovenian, Dutch. Our conversation casually covered the whole world over, like tiny birds flitting across royal rooftops in every hemisphere. For us it seemed, the world was, and had already been, our oyster. We were somewhere around Dubai in 2005 when we came upon them at a cross in the path.

These were the Batwa. An ancient Pygmy tribe who, in their glory, lived among the fresh forests that used to swell at the feet of these hills. But after years of agricultural proliferation spurred by the Bakiga - the  dominant local tribe whose population is growing faster than the farmland they need to support it - nearly every scrap of forest has flattened into patchwork shelves of crops and turned soil. Years of war and encroachment by the Bakiga, the Hutu and the Tutsi eventually favored the agricultural way of life over the nomadic. Here near the border, the Batwa fell first to the Bakiga, then to the Bakiga’s locally brewed beer and at last to the mountain gorilla when they were chased from their last forested refuges - the national parks. They now scavenge the border in exile, on a tight rope between blending in and dying out.  40% of them survive by begging. The rest of East Africa either despises or pities them, but all look down on them as the untouchables of these green hills. Worse than condemned, they are simply unseen, ignored and wished away. Left to wander in the small shade of the banana leaves. Hardly any have been educated and few will employ them. But perhaps worse than their deplorable poverty is the slow obliteration of their rich culture and human dignity as a people - of which there seems to be little left to burn. The past they know by heart, without having themselves lived through it - a debt to be paid a penny at a time. The future they bargain away for one more day. There are less than 80,000 Batwa left in the world. And roughly 25 of them were standing before us, standing silently in the hot sun.

A whole head shorter than other Africans, they stood with babies in their arms, ragged wraps on their heads and struggle showing around their mouths. Previously naked except for animal skins, they now bag themselves in old modern clothes and African wraps, not one of which is not heavily soiled and worn. Most small children have large old Tshirts on and no pants or underwear. The women looked shy, with leather cheeks holding tiny babies who are small and thin enough to be newborns. Some looking out from just one eye, with the other blue and blind. They look hearty and resourceful, but still so few - and the angles around the eyes in their faces gave away the terribly tangible trace of sadness and subordination. We fell immediately silent surveying them. Our guide exchanged a warm hug and handshake with their leader followed by a few words. Then they brought out a few piles of dry hay for us to sit on without speaking. We were told they will dance for us now.

A line of them stood behind - the chorus -  some with children in their arms. A few created a new line in front, following the lead of the chief. They blinked into the sun at us. A drum beat arose from a stick on an empty cooking oil container. And the back line started to sing.

Never in my life has such a sound brought me to the brink of my very existence and back so quickly. Their voices are full and ringing, with a slight harmony in the words of their language. As the sound rises from their chests, it brings on its wings a story of these people. It bypasses the ears and carries straight to the heart.  It is a story, a sound of such immediate joy and immense grief, of earthy release and inhereted oppression, of magic and indignity.  within that song, a sad and silenced people appear, awake and alive before your very eyes. A ressurrection, both devout and  irreverent, and so twice as hypnotizing.  In listening, you do not yourself allow the tears to come - they flow for a few moments on someone else’s orders. 

Now, the front line begins to dance. Stomping both feet to the rhythm, waving their arms and pumping their chests as if in a spiritual fit, possessed by the music and their own power coming through them. Jumping and waving, with hands outspread. A return to earth of some uncelebrated celestial power using the unaltered voice of the human heart. It was then clear to me that we had been let in on some great secret, one which we would never at all understand. Little birds alighting on the unmarked grave of the Madonna in their great migration North.

After the songs were finished, the two lines resumed their previous postures of modest distance and reservation. The children started up once again their little fusses and kitten cries in the arms of the women. As instructed, we each went down the line and shook their hands, thanking them with a nod and smile as they most certainly did not understand the English phrase. Most would not look up, but when they did, they would wrinkle their eyes in a smile and you would feel you had just been let back into the womb, in out of the rain into a warm dark cottage with a crackling fire.

With that, we the little birds took wing once again, up the steep path to the next ridge, skirting along the border like a train track following a river. Below us, our guide transferred the designated stack of shillings in meager hopes that some of it escaped the bottle and went to buying food and goods. And on we went, steering away from the borderlands and back into humanity up the left leg of Uganda toward where our camp was waiting.

Like many a witch in the woods, it is local lore that the Batwa have magical powers and that if you jump over a Batwa person that you will be healed of any physical ailments you might have. The mystery belonging to what remains of these native people is harder to penetrate than the  old mist-veiled forests they used to glide through. Be they the bearers of  life after certain death, or just a painful reminder to the rest of us of what human society can so blindly leave out in the cold, one thing is for certain -  the Batwa may be forgotten but they are not yet  gone.And like the humility we may have lost along the way, they will be waiting for us, voices rising from the ash of garbage pyres, there at the border with the familiar.


On the Road Again

6am in Dar came early and dark. We woke up to find ourselves behind the driver on an old bus at Ubungo bus station - already teeming just before sunup.

Brown packages scribbled to who knows where were being thrown over the driver onto the dash into the growing pile. This rusty old bus - one in a long line of many others decorated with old window paint and random American bumper stickers -  was already full of people. You should see all those beautiful khanga colors sitting patiently in balding old stained carpet seats, with babies and bags all propped on laps. The sun was rising over the din, through the dirty windows of the old bus. And the bus station - well, lets just say you’re probably better off in times square on new year’s eve wearing a monkey suit and waving a communist flag.

We had been successfully snuck on the bus just like two bags of powder cocaine without being noticed. We sat up front behind the driver, the only mzungus in sight, and watched the scene unfold below.  The tops of heads flowed like coffee beans from a spilled bag or flies on a mango, in every direction with no clear path.  People doing so many different things at once your eyes couldn’t keep up without making you positively dizzy. Tickets being sold randomly in the crowd scribbling out receipts this way and that. Vendors knocking on bus windows toting bags of bread, newspapers, T-shirts, cashews, random plastic Tupperware, basically anything that could be picked up at a local goodwill store. Buses pulling out into the crowd without warning and without breaking for rivulets of people weaving around the front. Luggage on heads, coins in hand, nothing on the faces as they make their way through the madness. Two buses pulled out at the same time ahead of us, inches from each others bumper and of course 4 or 5 people somehow passing in between. One attempted to turn wide through an opening the size of less than a single lane while the other inched forward at an angle at its side, blocking a stream of people that then flowed around it like water round a rock. The bus reversed and the people leaning against it casually stepped out of its way.  The smell of dirty diesel made its way through the bus. Someone threw a cigarette precariously into a mucky pool of rainbow oiled water and I was just waiting for the whole place to burst heads first into flames. Five buses were jumbled at all angles around us within a space of about a two lane highway - believe it. Vendors crowded the doorways and banged on the sides, making kissing noises to attract attention. It took nearly 45 minutes to make our way off onto the highway.

Then we were off and wobbling on our jelly wheels. By the way we were moving in and out of traffic, you’d think we were a Ferrari needing a paint job. If there isn’t a space, pull out and make one. If the person is going too slow in front of you, come in so hot that they pull off on the shoulder to your left to let you through. If there are people walking in the road or in the crosswalks, simply pull forward into them and instead of dispersing in panic they will simply amble off. Except for the stragglers who fail to move in time, and they will simply be inched out of the way by the bumper. Speed limits simply need not apply. The bus door is open 90% of the time, even on the highway and the attendant swings outside of it and yells things as we pass by the villages. All the way from Dar to Arusha, there are only one lane highways. This means a hierarchy of some kind must exist - and that class system is, very simply, the bigger the better. Every square foot of mass a vehicle has adds to its priority on the by ways. If you are smaller, you will receive a short honk and then be expected to move over to the side or be sideswiped. Honk honk. Comin’ through. When passing (and you must pass often), no slowing down is necessary - only swerving into the other lane for a full five minutes and any oncoming, smaller traffic will veer into the shoulder to let you complete your pass in peace. Being the big kaunas on the road simply to the effect of their size, these coast-to-coast buses really get moving, I can tell you. This gives the general feeling that you are actually safer while other traffic is present, regardless of how many near collisions you may need to avoid with these vehicles. This is because when the road is empty, the bus drivers feel the need to make up for all the time they have wasted swerving in and out of traffic. Which leaves you no choice but to strategize what body position might give you the best chance at surviving a bus rollover of this magnitude. And given the rusty shape of the 1970 frame, the odds don’t look so great. In Africa, it seems it really is about getting where you want to go or die trying.

Twelve hours went by, alternating between certain death and peaceful countryside views. Villages upon villages passed by like still frames. Most of the country is green cut with this ruddy red dirt like a rare steak. A woman walking carrying a machete on her head. Huge bags of charcoal wrapped in twine sitting in potato sacks on the side of the road like little travelers themselves. Trash lacing the ditches and burn scars scraping black patches in the grass. Shirtless men sweating in the sun, hacking at the weeds with a scythe on miles of overgrown roadside. A barefoot child squatted in the red dirt playing with an old brown shoe as if it were a toy airplane. Boys playing a rugged game of soccer in the bush with an empty water bottle for a ball.

The lush green grasses and papery banana leaves of coastal Tanzania soon started to run into rolling savanna and the vegetation became squat and irritable. Small rocky hills and ridges rose up from the roll of the road and everything becomame progressively dustier. Miniature, portable looking towns came up and fell away fast like the wave of a hand. Twists in the road that lead to more nowhere. The tall, dark and wispy figures of the Maasai tribe could be seen draped in robes of their signature colors, rich red and purple, and long walking stick. They come into view like distant colorful ghosts, almost always solitary on a long stretch of empty bush land, and then waft around in your memory as gracefully as they appeared to you in life. Sometimes you can see them riding their bicycles, with beaded anklets on their long bare legs and their positively gorgeous traditional wraps flapping like crimson flags in the wind. By the time we neared Arusha, the bush had become dusty, thorny and seemingly endless - an intimidating patchwork of flatlands and dry grasses. And when the base of Kili rose like the thick stump of a huge redwood, its peak shrouded in clouds, we knew we are almost there. We giggled in spite of ourselves as our driver nearly overturned a minibus that is riding the ditch like a sideways caterpillar in an effort to get out of our way. We were certain we would look back on this day and laugh.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Killing Time in the Serengeti


We lost sight of her in the tall grass. Straining, we struggled to keep our binoculars to our eyes, like a bunch of khaki possums waiting for sundown. She was there. We had seen her watch the herd of wilder beast from afar on a rock, seen her slink into the grass in a C shape and into a ditch so as to avert their collective eye. For nearly an hour we had followed her, just a tiny shadowy speck among the high grass as she moved inch by inch closer to the herd, stopping every few steps to avoid being seen. The endlessly, flat wheaty Serengeti grasses cloaked her effortlessly - she disappeared and reappeared like a ghost or a mirage through tepid night air. But it was noon. The heat waves showed themselves on the flats.  The few clouds served little practical purpose other than an impressive aesthetic one and offered little protection. You could count the trees and bushes for miles and you wouldn’t even make it to ten. The rest - a wide and perfectly flat spaghetti plain, itself transfixed on that huge peacock sky. The grasses as they waved in the dusty breeze made subtle patterns if you looked closely, circles of fading green and darker brown, waving yellow, and it was these that made her tawny head virtually vanish underneath the breeze.

Close to an hour dragged on now. We knew she was interested. She had been watching the wildebeest herd ever since we spotted her and had now she flanked them like an ambushing army, just her ears showing from time to time. She drew ever closer, even as she stopped to lie down below the grass for minutes on end to keep out of their sight. We scratched, swatted at flies, muttered to each other, contemplated the sky and tried to keep the binoculars steady in our hands as we waited to catch another glimpse of her. Only three jeeps left now, the rest had gone to ogle the male lions lounging by a tree a few miles away in the shade. A few wildebeest strayed from the herd. Right about then, she disappeared from view. We were sure that this was the time. She would pounce at any moment. There was one, so close within her clutches it had wandered all by itself. But still nothing. She was either stalking or sleeping. Too hard to tell which from this distance. Her patience showed her hunger. More minutes passed.

All at once it was on. She leapt from her keep and the herd of wildebeest panicked. A whoop rose from the jeeps like a hunting call as we watched her latch onto the front of her target - a large, stray wildebeest. The struggle that ensued was fierce and from a distance looked almost like a passionate dance. The lioness pawing for the neck as the wildebeest bucked for its life face to face with its fate. Our guides in the three jeeps were speaking hurriedly in Swahili until finally, without a thought, our guide pulled the jeep off the road and out across the plain toward the two, locked in their fateful battle. Standing in the back of the open jeep, careening at full speed over the prairie under that full breath of sky, I felt a rush of freedom - like I myself was a part of the race for life.

A cloud of dust had risen, lioness and wildebeest taking their turns at fate. One moment she was up hanging at its side on a ride for her prize and the next she had fallen under it, her feet tumbling in the air in an effort to bring it down. Desperation in every step of the dance, knowing every twirl was just inches from the edge of the universal stage. Both for their lives. She for another day of many without food and he for just seconds now, squalling in the dust of his fleeing herd. He was too strong for her to get a good grasp by the throat and so the fight came hoof to the tooth and both would go down fighting.

At last, as the jeeps leapt into the tall grasses where they struggled, she sunk her teeth around his muzzle and brought him with a creaking groan to the dust. Our jeeps crowd around her as she grips him with her paws and holds his muzzle firmly in her jaws. He was too strong to break around the neck. So, panting, she will suffocate him to death. His great black body weight was heaving beneath her paws. His black eyes rolling in their last terrible meeting in this life. His swelling belly still rising and falling in desperate last breaths. He shuddered as the air backs into his body. She held fast and tight, her jaws clenched around his face. He knew death was on him and he made a last, resigned effort with his legs. His suffering, from a Toyota jeep loaded with white-clad tourists snapping photos of his death throes, is almost unbearable to watch. Alive is this being we are watching like a reality TV show heaving in the labor of his last moments at the hands of a frantically hungry lioness. Oozing blood from the puncture wounds in his side, he is like a great king brought to the scaffold as his horns hit the ground and his eyes flare with fear and a searing suffering. Snap go the cameras. All of us, three jeeps in the middle of the Serengeti plain, bore witness to the ritual, a whole truckload of French children narrating it with flippant quips and airplane noises, and a walkie talkie radio hemming in the background. Death is so godless.

Exhausted, the lioness was panting heavily from the effort, her body heaving and her veins popping from her skin. Beads of sun ran down her golden fur when she moved. The jeeps had her almost surrounded now, like a pack of vultures were, within 10 feet of her and her kill. She glared hopelessly from one jeep to the other. There was no shade or tall grass for miles and the noon sun scorching our forearms. She looked desperate to drag her prey somewhere safe. But there was no where to go and no liberties to be taken as these three strange objects threatened the kill she so badly needed. She stood over the dead wildebeest, tongue almost completely from her mouth in exhaustion and heat. But her eyes darted from one human to the next in the trucks, asking us what we wanted and warning us from her hard earned meal. They were enough to shame a monk, those eyes, pupils almost disappeared completely in burning prairie fire as they looked at you. She was afraid and she was exhausted. All we could hear was the wind in the grass and her heavy breathing as she blinked her yellow eyes into the sun as if they led to the center of the earth. Many times she attempted to drag the prey a few feet, fruitlessly away from the jeeps, before she once again bent to pant in the sun. I flooded in shame, like a scantily dressed intruder in a place of devout worship. Something was sacred here and we had exploded upon it without grace. Like intruding on two lovers of great vitality and purpose. It had been a dance of brutality, beauty, achievement and loss. And an awful thing to behold.  It left me feeling singed with its violence and its sincerity and its desperation. She has no mercy and yet she is not a demon. In all her glory, she is already absolved.

One by one the jeeps departed. The smoke rose from the drama that had been taken to that holy ground and life on the prairie moved on in silence. And we left her to her great plain, disappearing from view, a tawny, panting speck among the tides of the Serengeti grasses. 


The Lady of the Lions


“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.