Rules of the Wild

by Francesca Marciano

  “I mean, Adam was born here, so okay, to him this is home … But what do you do in a place like this? I mean I would die, you know, I would fucking die if I had to live so far away from the city.”

  “I guess I’ve had enough of city life,” I said dryly.

  The river, just below us, curved in a narrow bend. I kept my eyes on a big croc on the opposite bank which looked like a mud sculpture. I pointed it out to him. He squinted, and vaguely nodded. He wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction of showing any interest in wildlife this morning. He turned to his liquid crystal screen and tapped away for a few seconds.

  “You know, this isn’t real. It’s just a big fantasy.”

  I didn’t answer. He bored me so much already I wanted to scream.

  “This is just another Disneyland, it has nothing to do with the real world out there. They’ve let nature take over because they can charge you money to come and see how it used to be thousands of years ago, the hunting and the killing and all that. The minute they stop making money from nature, they’ll destroy it as they have done everywhere else in the world.”

  I took up the binoculars and pretended to study the river in search of more game.

  “They don’t need wildlife in Nigeria. You know why? They’ve got oil there.” He sniggered. “Lots.”

  He pointed impatiently at his computer screen as if to remind me of the major financial exchanges taking place in Lagos at that very moment while we were wasting our time watching crocs in the mud.

  “You live inside a museum, you realize that…”

  “Well, you are being pretty Ptolemaic here,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know how before Galileo we believed in the Ptolemaic system, the earth being the unmovable center of the universe?”

  He looked at me suspiciously. He didn’t understand, but he didn’t like being called that anyway.

  “In other words, why is it always that the West decides what’s real and what isn’t?,” I said.

  He shook his head, as if I was being hopelessly ludicrous.

  “I mean, this is the end of the millennium, you guys!”

  “And so what?” I didn’t like the way he called me “you guys.”

  “Well, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize to tell you that the future isn’t heading forward in this part of the planet. If I were you I wouldn’t like to be left so far behind.”

  “And what would you do if you were me?” I asked, lighting my first cigarette of the day. I knew he found it disgusting that I should smoke so early, and I purposely blew the smoke on his computer screen.

  “Well, I would take advantage of all the wonderful technology the West is producing…. There’s a whole world out there, and believe me, it’s fucking fabulous!”

  “I guess so,” I said dubiously.

  “And besides,” he said menacingly, his eyes locking into mine, “you are a smart and sexy woman. I would get the hell out of here fast and stop worrying about which bird is which!”

  I didn’t know which bird was which. I didn’t know the name of anything, and I feared wild animals as much as the Anorexic Beauties because, just like them, I knew nothing about their behaviour or their habits.

  But still I didn’t like the clients to be around me; their presence irritated me because it reminded me of everything I had run away from. Their inquisitive looks, their nosy questions made me uneasy, corrupted my vision of the landscape. It was as if they were secret agents who had been sent on a mission to handcuff me and take me home again.

  There were exceptions, of course. You thought you knew exactly what they were going to be like the minute you saw them step out of the car with their fancy luggage, and instead they proved you wrong.

  Tara was in her late forties, platinum blond hair, garish clothes, long silvery fake nails, heavy makeup, Texan hat. She looked like a rich hooker from Vegas. Adam and I couldn’t figure out why on earth she had come on safari all on her own. She seemed to hate the bush, jumped at every noise, screamed at every insect, complained about her fingernails splitting, and kept trotting around camp in high heels. I had all these theories about her.

  Was she running away from someone? Was she a spy? A transsexual? What was her secret?

  “I work in the movie industry, honey,” she said to me when I gathered the courage to ask her. “Exotic animals. Animal trainer, my specialty is cats. Every lion or tiger you see in a movie is mine.”

  “Tigers?”

  “Siberian, Bengali. Back home I sleep with four of them in my bed. Figured it was time to come to Africa and see a bit of untrained wildlife.”

  It all fell into place: she had that flamboyant circus quality which some women who love cats have.

  Tara knew absolutely everything about big cats. She even knew how to treat their skin problems, worms, vitamin deficiencies. Whenever she spotted a lion or a cheetah in a game drive she would ask Adam to get really close with the car and started whispering to them in an incomprehensible language. The animals would always turn their heads and listen to her, half hypnotized. It was as if they recognized her. Adam was impressed. Now he looked at her with a completely different attitude.

  “What are those sounds you make? Is it a language they understand?” he’d ask her.

  “It’s a secret,” she would say, smiling enigmatically. “I’m not going to give it away.”

  You could tell she would know how to touch them, you could feel her total absence of fear. Next to a wild animal, her grotesque appearance would inexplicably undergo a transformation. Regardless of the garishness of her outfit she suddenly looked regal.

  Adam asked what had made her become an animal trainer.

  “Put it this way, honey. These days you can get shot in the head any day where I live. I’d rather be killed by a beautiful wild animal than have my brain blasted by some retard on crack. It’s a much sexier way to go.”

  Apart from the few exceptions, when Adam took off with the clients on a game drive I usually preferred to stay behind and take walks along the river or climb up the mountain ridge, escorted by two of the Samburu askaris who worked at the camp.

  Lenjo always walked in front, holding his long spear and his rungu, the short club carved in olive wood which every Samburu keeps in his hand at all times. Diani, barely in his teens, walked behind me. I kept my eyes on Lenjo’s back: his long braided hair smeared in cow grease and red ochre dangled gently on his back; the red shuka, which he tied over one shoulder like a Roman toga, flapped in the wind; his incredibly long, lean legs seemed to touch the earth with the lightness of a feather. He was a Moran, a warrior of his tribe. Diani had not been circumcised yet and therefore had not acquired the status of a Moran. His hair was still short, his ears had not been pierced, he didn’t wear the colourful beads which adorned Lenjo’s dark skin.

  We walked in silence, listening to the sounds of the bush, feeling the cool morning air brush our arms and legs. Every now and then Lenjo would stop and look out. I could feel his eyes scanning the bush ahead. There was always a moment of suspense, when I would hold my breath not knowing what would happen next. I would turn back to check Diani’s expression, and I always found him chewing a twig and looking quite relaxed, leaning on his spear.

  “Ndovu.” Elephant, Lenjo would announce quietly after a long silence, slowly pointing to the valley below. I could only hear a faint sound of branches falling, and see trees swaying in the thick of the bush.

  Yes, there they were. Big elephants with huge tusks. One, two, three—up to twenty, sometimes. We would watch in silence for a while. Lenjo and Diani would speak in Samburu, commenting on the size of the animals. Lenjo, who spoke a bit of English, would then point at an indistinct brown patch in the bush and say with satisfaction, “Very very big one.”

  He also liked to show me the plants and the herbs the Samburu use.

  “This very dangerous; it can kill elephant. You put this on arrowheads, it will finish you in two minutes,” he would say of a very
innocent-looking green branch. Then he would show me a velvety silver leaf.

  “This we call Moran blanket because the Morans when they sleep out under the sky, they rest on these leaves. Very very soft, like a blanket… This one if you smell it it will cure your cold…this one will make you very very strong, if you boil the bark and drink it like soup, it will make you very hungry and you will eat one big goat, maybe two…”

  I liked the way the young warriors always boasted about what they could do. Yes, of course they could kill a lion with their spear, steal a hundred cattle from a neighbouring tribe, walk thirty miles, eat a whole goat in one night. There was nothing too big or too strong for a Moran.

  A Samburu warrior needed to be brave, he was taught this from the earliest age.

  “And if you just bend your toes when they circumcise you,” said Lenjo with a smile, “oh, you’re finished. They will call you a coward, and it will be shame on your family. Sure.”

  He and Diani laughed at my surprise. Circumcision was the favourite subject of young Samburus.

  “You have to be brave and sit still when they cut you with a knife. Everyone is looking at you to see if maybe you bend your toe…So you have to sit still, like this.”

  Lenjo would close his eyes as if he was lightly asleep. Diani would nod encouragingly. They smiled proudly, having made their point.

  “Mape. Let’s go now.”

  We walked in silence for long stretches, then we stopped and sat cross-legged on top of a boulder looking down at the endless plain. We’d sit like that in silence, listening to the sound of the wind whistling below. I liked to be able to remain that quiet in the company of others, without feeling the need to fill up the silence with chatter.

  Lenjo would gently break the silence.

  “Malo.” Greater kudu, and he would point at a tiny dot in the distance. He and Diani laughed at me whenever they caught me squinting.

  I loved the feeling of those walks.

  There is a very special bond between humans who are walking close to each other in the wilderness. They have to move carefully, they need to be ready for any eventuality. No one could be further apart than me from those two young warriors, yet as we were sliding silently through the tall grass we looked out for the same signs, we scanned, we smelled, we listened. In the remote possibility that anything was going to happen, it would happen to the three of us, whether it be a buffalo bursting out of the grass, a lion or a cobra. Yes, jaded clients might go on believing the bush was a fantasy world, but nature felt real enough to me.

  And so vivid was that feeling that all the rage and pain I had felt when I first arrived now seemed to belong to another life. It was as if the silence of wilderness had seeped into me and had quietened the useless noise of my fear.

  Lenjo always smiled when I asked him what we would do if we met a lion in the grass.

  “Lions are afraid of men. But you don’t show your fear, because animals can know. You always be brave and lion will run away from you. Sure.”

  We never met a lion, so I never had to test his theory.

  Once though, when we had nearly reached camp, he suddenly stopped. So did my heart: I knew this time we had walked upon something. Lenjo turned to me and pointed silently into the trees. I could barely make out a shape and I saw some branches move.

  “Elephants,” he whispered, and began to step back. For what seemed an eternity, the three of us walked backwards, keeping our eyes fixed on the moving branches. Then we heard the trumpeting. It literally shook the earth, it was so close. Then the branches being broken. A shot of adrenaline fired into my body. Fear in its purest form. Lenjo and Diani froze for a split second, then signalled me to run.

  I immediately grabbed Lenjo’s elbow, I didn’t trust my legs to be as fast as his. We ran and ran, zigzagging through the bush, birds fluttering their wings all around us. I didn’t know whether we were still being chased, I only concentrated on the running and suddenly—I don’t know where that came from—I knew we were going to be fine.

  The incredible thing was that the more we ran, the more we laughed. We kept holding on to each other, laughing hysterically, like children playing a game. We burst into camp panting and shaking with laughter.

  “Huyu, anaweza kukimbia sana,” said Lenjo to Adam and the other guys, pointing at me and shaking his head with a smile.

  “Of course I can run, what did you think?” I replied jokingly, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

  And suddenly I felt victorious. It was fun, after all, to be faster than an angry elephant.

  Iris materialized one evening in the dusky light right after sunset, in full regalia—that is to say in her battered olive green Land Rover, handbag-size pistol in the glove compartment, old felt hat atop her long blond braid, covered with red dust, Samburu beads and sweat, accompanied by two striking Morans in the back seat.

  We had put up camp not far from Wamba. The clients, a group of middle-aged Chicago surgeons with their wives, looked at this wild blond creature in disbelief, and one of them actually took out his camera for a snap. Iris was kissing Adam with passion.

  “Oh man! I’ve driven all the way from South Horr, I’m finished! Let me have a drink before anything else…How do you do, Iris Sorensen…pleased to meet you…sorry to intrude on your sundowner…Oh Esmé, finally… There you are, at last!”

  Suddenly I was squeezed in her powerful embrace. She smelled of dust and petrol. She took a good look at me and then turned to the clients.

  “I’ve heard so much about this woman!”

  Iris was on her way back to Nairobi from further north where she had been travelling for two months, taking pictures for a new book on the tribes of the North. She’d heard over the bush radio that Adam had put up camp on the Ewaso and she’d decided to stop over and rest for a day. How she had found the camp I don’t know; it seemed to me we were in the middle of nowhere. But obviously not nowhere enough for a bush woman like Iris.

  Adam poured her a drink while she greeted the staff. She seemed to have known them all a long time. Lenjo in particular was thrilled to see her. They went into a very elaborate handshake and joked in Samburu.

  “Oh, that one. He’s such a star,” she said to Adam, returning to her chair and shaking her head. “I’m going to steal him from you one day.”

  She took out a bag of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette on her lap. We were all sitting around her, our eyes fixed on her like on a screen. She shook her head and smiled at us.

  “Let me tell you, it feels great to have reached here. Everyone’s pretty nervous around Barsaloi these days, because of the shiftas.”

  “What’s that?” asked the wife of one of the surgeons.

  “Bandits,” she said nonchalantly. Then, licking the rolling paper, “Pretty nasty ones too.”

  The clients got more excited and began an interview. Was her book going to be published in the States? Yes, indeed.

  Who was this woman? Had I ever heard of her? Yes, of course I had, and not only that: I had actually had her first book in my hands not long before. It was displayed in the window of the New Stanley Hotel bookstore. It was called something like The Last Rites, and I remembered her picture on the dust jacket. Suntanned, her long hair loose, covered with tribal jewelry, smiling from her muddy Land Rover.

  I remember thinking, She can’t be for real.

  But here she was, the realest of the real, same props included.

  Was she born in Kenya? The clients were eager to know more.

  Yes, and she had lived most of her life with the nomadic tribes of the North. Her father was a Swedish farmer who had come to Africa in the mid-fifties and settled near Maralal.

  After dinner with the clients, the three of us sat by the fire. She was simply wrapped in a Somali kikoy and a man’s shirt, her long silky hair loose on her back. In many ways she looked like a bleached version of a Moran: the same elegant step, the same gaunt figure.

  Adam looked happy to have her there; they seemed to sh
are an intimacy which dated back a long time. Iris was constantly referring to people they knew in common, speaking in shorthand of places they were both familiar with in the bush. They obviously had a common history of safaris and adventures, travels and nights spent under just a mosquito net and the stars.

  “You know I got stuck in the Ndotos for a week, my gearshift broke off in my hands, can you believe it? So I had to wait for this guy to come all the way from that mission to fix it—remember that mission where we bought petrol the time we went through the Kaisut desert? What’s it called?”

  “Yeah, I remember…the mission of that Italian priest, the mechanic…”

  “Well, he’s dead now. But there is a Canadian priest in his place, a great guy. He helped me fix it in the end…”

  “Excellent.”

  “Remember that bridge, past the big volcanic rock, as you head towards Ol Doinyo Nyiro?”

  “It’s washed out, I know. I went past it about four weeks ago.”

  “The road is such a nightmare now. I kept getting stuck in the mud.”

  Their landmarks were rocks and mountains and trees, and water holes and scattered manyattas in the bush. I sat back listening to them talk about the land, redesign it, just for the pleasure of making it a controllable entity again rather than an abstraction. All that land which stretched around us, which had no name or shape and made no sense at all to me.

  Their conversation made me think of the Aborigines in Australia, who believe that the earth was shaped because it had been sung. In the Dreamtime, the Ancestors woke up from total darkness and as the Light began to shine they started walking. They walked about and sang. They sang the shape of each rock and water hole and hill. They sang the trees, the stones, the rivers, the canyons. That’s how they made the world: by singing it bit by bit. The “song lines” were their routes, the tracks of their singing from here to there. People didn’t inherit land, they inherited songlines. Tribes owned songs.

  Virtually all of the Australian landscape can be sung. Where one tribe would finish another one would pick up.