A Primate's Memoir, page 14
But the most extravagantly Byzantine case of bush crazies I had ever seen came with Samwelly. I still wonder to what sordid end it would have led to had he not been saved by the elephants.
Samwelly was the brother of Richard, my research assistant. As I mentioned, Richard lived in the staff quarters of one of the tourist camps, five miles away. That year, Richard had brought Samwelly out from the farm to take care of my camp. We started off auspiciously enough. The first day was brutal work—putting up tents, digging garbage and latrine holes, collecting firewood. Late in the afternoon, fire going, we were getting hungry. I said I would dig the drainage lines for the tents if Samwelly would get supper going. Here, I said, cook up some rice and beans and, when they are ready, toss in this fish—handing him a can of the mackerel delight. I went back to work until, peripherally, I noted that he was standing, lost in consternation. Uh-oh, some sort of cultural snafu has occurred. One gets used to that—you don’t quite know what you have taken for granted and not explained, but something has occurred. For example, when I began to teach Richard how to drive, we lurched and jerked into camp, he, a pleased, excited mess. I leapt out to run to the toilet and returned to find that I had neglected to teach Richard a basic—how to open a car door. He was inside, clawing at the window to get out. Now, I had neglected something else basic with Samwelly, but I did not know what. Finally, he made it clear that while he was plenty familiar with canned food, he had never actually operated a can opener before. This was easily remedied (far more easily than with one prior camp guy, for whom the canned food concept was itself novel—lookathis, we white folks hide food inside metal). We opened up a can of plums in sugar syrup—after all, this was a special occasion—and we were on our way to becoming friends. The next day, while I was out with the baboons, Samwelly displayed his new skills in opening three months of cans of mackerel and plums. We ate like hogs that night and distributed the rest, and things were corrected after an extra resupply trip to Nairobi.
From there, things with Samwelly got even better. Very soon, it became apparent that he had a genius for constructing things, jury-rigging contraptions out in the bush. Camp was soon boiling with projects. The rainy season was still continuing when I first got there, and Samwelly went to work. Marching off into a grove of trees with a machete one afternoon, he had soon cut off four large branches, trimmed and straightened them into posts; he dug little holes, poured water into them until they were soft mud, and soon had the posts solidly upright. More chopping and hacking, and a bunch of leafy branches were being roped together with vine—vimblix, we had a nifty lean-to to stand under during the rain. A few days later, I returned to find a back wall made of branches and leaves. Then another wall, and then a third. A window appeared for the back wall. Projects began to pop up everywhere. Samwelly dug cisterns for the water barrels—one day, I returned to camp, stinking hot, and Samwelly was sitting there drinking cold water. One evening in the lean-to, which now had a hearth, Samwelly suddenly asked, “Why don’t you go down to the river to wash?” I headed down, on the lookout for buffalo in the fading light, and discovered that he had diverted the river into a series of bathing pools.
The center of all the activity was the lean-to, fast becoming a more and more complex house. All four sides were enclosed. A door was put in, a vestibule, a second room. Around the hearth there were soon benches. A table. Everything made of mud and sticks and leaves and vines and rocks, seemingly defying gravity. Samwelly waterproofed the house with flattened tin cans still smelling of mackerel. One of my baboon cages was soon commandeered to form an animal-proof pantry. Every cup and bowl in camp disappeared, ferreted into little secret hiding holes in the wall, angled so as to fill with water in the rain. Shelves for the utensils, a picture of the president on the wall, cunning little platforms in the walls to display cans of mackerel. It got to the point where, each day, I would come back to camp anticipating what new wonder he would have constructed—a mud and dung calliope, perhaps, hand-carved busts of famous zoologists, or a perfect 1:10 replica of the palace at Versailles made out of cans of Taiwanese mackerel.
Then, one day, something must have snapped. I blame it on myself. I had had engine trouble, been stuck out overnight, sleeping in the vehicle, and anxiety or relief or whatever at not having me there must have thrown Samwelly into a frenzy of activity. I returned the next day and found him with an excited gleam about him. He suggested I go wash in the river.
“Samwelly, you have done something very big to the river, haven’t you?”
Yes. Yes.
I went down, Samwelly following excitedly, to discover that … the river was gone. Puzzled, alarmed, I walked up the riverbed a bit, came around a bend, and found that Samwelly had presumably labored nonstop for two days in a maddened outburst of work and had managed to dam up the entire river. Stopped cold. Our pathetic pissant six-inch-deep, three-foot-wide trickle of a river was now forming Lake Samwelly behind a five-foot wall of sand and rocks.
Samwelly beamed with pleasure—this was his proudest accomplishment. Hey, Samwelly, what’s going on? I stopped the river, he said. Yeah, I can see that, but why? Now it will not run away, it will not dry up now that the rains have stopped.
In theory, the dam was wonderful; for years I had fantasized about damming the river. The river fed into the Mara River, which fed into Lake Victoria, which fed the Nile, and I figured that if I blocked our river, eventually Cairo would be reeling, the Suez Canal disrupted, the Indian raj isolated, and Queen Victoria and the whole empire under my control. But despite the attraction of that, there were some insurmountable drawbacks to blocking the river, and the dam had to go. I tried to explain that in about two weeks of sitting here, this water was going to be completely stagnant and full of mosquitoes and wildebeest shit and bilharzia and infectious snails and more malaria than had ever been dreamed of. Samwelly was adamant—he did not want the lake to go. We will always have water, we can go swimming, we can grow fish here, even mackerel, he argued. Naw, the dam has to go. Samwelly wasn’t budging: I will build a boat out of branches so that we can go sailing, we can put crocodiles there to protect us, the tourists will come and pay us to take pictures. Finally, I had to remind him of the biggest problem with the dam. Yeah, but Samwelly, I said, you have cut off the water supply of the Masai in the village and tonight the warriors are going to come and spear you.
This turned the trick. Obviously unhappy, he conceded, and we spent the rest of the afternoon breaking down the wall.
The disappointment seemed to break his spirit as well. He withdrew to his tent for the rest of the day. The funk continued the next day and the next. Work stopped on Samwelly’s house after merely three mud and leaf rooms. The wine cellar, the gingerbread trim, the captain’s walk—none materialized. Samwelly stopped talking, would sit and stare at the fire all evening. He no longer jumped up to open tin cans; his mackerel went uneaten.
Samwelly was depressed, he was becoming unhinged. The river dam debacle had taken the wind out of him, his illusions of building Xanadu out of mud and sticks and leaves had crumbled, he was stuck out here in the howling back of beyond with some white guy and a bunch of drugged baboons. Richard and I consulted, and he was at a loss as to how to reenergize his brother. Another faithful camp guy was about to go over the edge.
It was not a good time for it to happen. The dry season was in full swing by then, and anyone, even in the best state of mind, would have been teetering under the circumstances. Every day, it became hotter and hotter, stinking hot, and soon Lake Samwelly would have been academic anyway, as the water evaporated before our eyes. The river became mud, the air full of dust and dry crackling tension, and all your moments were spent thinking of sno-cones and bathtubs. It was the time of year of the fires and the wildebeests.
Each year, the Serengeti, the great plain that the park was a part of, has a cyclical pattern of rain, so that at any given time of year, the grass is lush and five feet high somewhere, and throughout the year, a massive, teeming migratory herd of two million grunting wildebeests follow in the wake of the rains, racing the dry brush fires for the oceans of high grass. Following them is every hungry carnivore in the county.
Every year it was the same. The rains would stop, and a bush pilot, flying in, would report that the herd was fifty miles down the border in Tanzania. A week later, reports of them on the border. Then, the next afternoon, you’d stand on the roof of the Jeep and with your binoculars, spot a trickle of them coming over the slope of the far mountain. Then, the next morning, you’d awake with a start, because in every direction you could look, there’d be crowds, herds, thousands and thousands of rank, galloping wildebeests, belching and running and hemming and hawing and crapping over every inch of the front lawn.
It’s a parched frenzied maddening time of year. No water, no nothing, just dust and the fires, the whole Serengeti burning up, five-foot-high dry dry grass just exploding with lightning fires, huge waves of flame sweeping through—drive up to a mountain at night and watch the wall of flames below, the clouds reflecting orange, and amid it all, the mad wildebeests racing the flames, mowing down the grass, tangles of panicked, disoriented masses of bovid hyperkinetics dashing hysterical amid the fields, carnivores trailing them and giving us the willies at night, wildebeests screaming in the bushes amid packs of hyenas, somebody’s carcass scattered over an acre behind the tents in the morning, but, no problem, don’t worry, there are another hundred thousand wildebeests in the front yard, all of them running around hysterical without a care in the world or a thought in their heads except to maybe finally run stupidly and randomly enough, to paraphrase Peter Mathiessen, to fall over and dash their skulls open on rocks, as if to stop the itching in their mindless bovid brains. So the wildebeests and the fires, spires of flame and smoke and dust and heat, and Samwelly growing more sullen by the hour.
But, good luck, the elephants came and ate his house at night.
Elephants at night in camp are quite a spectacle, enough to speed up anyone’s heart. You wake up in a panic—chaos around the tent, crackling, a tree has fallen just missing the tent, someone is eating a bush just by the door, the tent lines have been torn loose. You peer out the window, and the tree trunk that wasn’t there when you went to sleep lifts up and comes down—an elephant leg! Now for certain you’ll be crushed to death by some oaf elephant dropping a tree on you. And each time, as you lie there in absolute terror waiting for your end at the feet of the elephants, there is this bizarre counter-current of feeling, this amazement you feel at hearing … their stomach sounds. The elephants make monstrous amounts of noise with their stomachs. It’s the most perfect sound on earth: low bass rumbles like the core of the earth, like you’re a child again and you have the most perfect ancient white-bearded enormous loving grandpa who, just because he loves you, is going to lift you in his gnarled hands and put you in his lap and put your ear to his belly and just for you he’s going to belch loudly and so slow and deep that it will last and make you tingle happily until the next ice age comes, that’s what it sounds like, you’re lying there in your tent prepared for death and you’re surrounded by this wonderful lulling aura of stomach noise that makes you want to curl up and sleep like a puppy, but you can’t because there are fucking elephants outside that are going to kill you, and invariably, you suddenly find yourself having to go outside the tent and take a crap. Once I really had to at such a time. Even I had become crazed with the rice and mackerel and had been taken to lunch at the lodge by tourists I had pulled out of the mud. I made up answers to their questions about animal behavior and mostly ate like a pig, finishing it all with mountains of the hideous lugubrious tasteless puddings that the British adore and have left as their most lasting legacy to Kenyan hoteliers. Chicken gumbo, meat loaf à la Kikuyu, curries, Spam loaf with pineapple slices, all topped with brown thickened murk pudding with crystallized sugar doodads and filigrees on top. I was up all night with the runs and regretted nothing until the elephants came. During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round.
That’s how it would be when the elephants came at night. And, good fortune, one night they came to eat Samwelly’s house. Samwelly turned out to be a natural-born elephant fighter. He and Richard came from the farmlands, where an elephant hadn’t been seen in generations. Yet, somewhere back in time, I knew some ancestor of theirs must have been in Arab elephant parties, as Samwelly had a natural fearlessness in battling them. A bunch of elephants were suddenly there, in the middle of the night, munching on the roof and back wall, destroying the waterproofing cans that Samwelly had so carefully placed. Samwelly, who had not uttered a word in days, Samwelly, who had been sinking into catatonia—suddenly, Samwelly was out there, roaring out of his tent. Silent Samwelly was yelling, flailing, hoo-ha-ing, throwing stones at the elephants, trying to get them away from his house. At first, I just cowered in my tent, charmed in terror at my impending death at the feet of the pachyderms. But Samwelly was out there fighting for his house. I finally went out to try to stop him before he was flattened, just as he was about to set fire to their tails. They looked more puzzled than angry, waved their trunks with the same patience as the ones (perhaps the same ones) who watched my Shakespearean craps a mere kilometer upriver some years earlier. Samwelly and I argued, grappled, yelled, and debated while they ate. I finally convinced him to return to his tent—he could not stop the elephants from their meal.
And they saved him from what seemed to be inevitable decline into the bush craziness. The next morning he was out surveying the damage—half the roof, one wall, gone, many of the tinned mackerel knickknacks upset, general disarray. By the second evening, amid more energy and smiles than I had seen in weeks, the damage was repaired. That night, the elephants returned again and ate the back wall and vestibule. And by the next nightfall, it was repaired, along with the construction of a clever vine-pulley system for hauling water out of the nonexistent river.
And thus it ran for the rest of the season. Samwelly would fix the house, the elephants would return to feast on his architecture, and each dawn, with renewed vigor, with renewed schemes, with vengeance and architectural soundness at the center of his soul, he would repair the damage. And for years to come, Samwelly and I would always stay in camp together, and elephants would always be welcome for dinner.
10
The First Masai
In camp, late afternoon, alone, Samwelly off visiting Richard in the tourist camp. I had spent much of the day collecting behavioral data on poor Jonathan, who really was an innocuous soul, pathetically stuck in the throes of this futile crush on Rebecca. It had left me in a sour, brooding mood. For what seemed like the zillionth time in a row, my behavioral sampling of him consisted almost entirely of his hopelessly following after her. She’d sit and groom with her friends; he’d sit at a stoic distance. She’d walk along, foraging on flowers and roots, and he’d agitatedly keep a perfect ten feet behind her, forgetting to eat in the process. She’d go and present to one of the big, prime-aged males, and Jonathan would sit and frantically pick at the fur on his knees and ankles. And then, when she’d finally settle down, sitting by herself, he’d quickly seize the opportunity and approach her … and she’d quickly scamper away without so much as a glance at him.
Let him sit near you, I thought with irritation. Talk to him a little, go out for a soda with him. And you could do worse for a prom date than him. I was angry with her. Look, the poor guy isn’t asking for you to groom him, he wants to groom you, it should kill you to let him groom you a little? Come on, Rebecca, it would make his day. No doubt the core of the problem was that I was badly in need of someone grooming me, if you know what I mean.
So I had a touch of bush crazies and was stewing in it. Thus, it is a good thing when some of the Masai guys stop by camp. They are led by Soirowa, a relative of Rhoda’s husband, a terrific guy who is fast becoming my friend. They’re up to something and very excited, gleaming with conspiratorial glee. It’s a goat roast.
The Masai actually do live almost entirely on cow’s blood and milk, just like the legends have it. More than a little bit repulsive to contemplate (or to drink, as I did once), but fairly logical from the standpoint of a nomadic pastoralist. So most of the time blood and milk, with a little maize meal thrown in for the modern ones, honey when you can get some sucker kid to brave the bees. And meat. On fancy occasions a goat is slaughtered. Certain wild animals are deemed to be “wild goats” or “wild cows” that have run away, and thus are suitable for hunting without spoiling the Masai’s reputation for never killing wildlife. Along with the occasional goat eating is a strong cultural prohibition: it is very bad luck, very bad luck, indeed, for men to be seen by women to be eating meat. How convenient—thus, only the guys get to eat meat in this protein-starved culture.
