A Primate's Memoir, page 5
Next, I had to figure out what to dart the baboons with. I checked out some long-distance, gas-powered anesthetic rifles, but they all cost a fortune, and had all these moving parts that would gum up in the field, and required replacement gas cylinders, and mostly made too much noise. I checked into tasers, which are guns that shoot an electrode on a wire into the target. Zap the guy, press a button, and some insane number of volts shoots through his body and he goes down like a sack of creamed spinach. Dandy, but apparently prone to giving the subject cardiac arrest, as a number of police forces were apparently discovering. I thought of feeding the animals drugged meat, using drugged snares, spraying a mind-clouding gas over the entire troop, and so on. Finally, I stumbled on a small Southern company that sold anesthetic blowguns to canine control units. Their brochure featured pictures of the executives who were all good ol’ boys with tobacco chaws in their mouths and John Deere caps on, they sold a cheap blowgun that shot out a 1cc syringe with a contact explosive, and it sounded terrific. The package arrived, and I was as excited as I was in second grade when the We-Like-to-Read book club would send the cartons of books with the shiny smell. The gun was a narrow reinforced tube, with little dart syringes, each with a formidable needle and some sort of explosive that I didn’t understand. I set up my Arm and Hammer detergent box across the room, loaded up, fired, and blew detergent all over my bookshelf.
I practiced relentlessly in my room. Angled shots, pointing down, pointing up, fast spinning shots, over the shoulder, in the wind (with the fan turned on). Allan, a stolid graduate school friend with a low center of gravity who had been a standout lineman on his Fredonia, Kansas, high school football squad, consented for me to practice wrestling him as if he were a darted baboon. This was done in the dorm basement next to the Gene Cloners club room.
Time went by and I improved. I could have darted a baboon anywhere in my room, in or out of Groucho Marx’s pajamas. Two fantasies dominated my darting then. I wanted to dart Fritz Lipmann. Lipmann was an incredibly famous biochemist, got the Nobel Prize decades ago, and now was an august octogenarian who would spend his day shuffling around the campus in his running shoes, endlessly passing my first-floor dorm window. I would get him in my blowgun sights from behind my biochemistry textbooks (which were half about him), choose between his rear end and shoulders, try to calculate his body weight for a proper dosage. I refrained from darting, however. The other fantasy was to sneak into Central Park and dart some random people. While they were down, I would quickly Magic Marker some Mayan hieroglyphic on their bellies and leave them to wake up soon thereafter underneath the Alice in Wonderland statue. I figured three such cases and the newspapers would be screaming, TV pundits would lecture on Mayan rituals of sacrifice, Jimmy Breslin would beg for me to give myself up, frenzied angry crowds would form around police stations in which jobless PhD archaeologists would try to come up with feeble alibis about how they weren’t the Mayan Darter.
The months passed and it was time to return to the field. I spent the entire night before my first darting awake and tossing, feeling queasy. By dawn, I was sick to my stomach, convinced I was about to pass out, all an excuse to get out of it. Finally, I headed out. And within a few minutes, I walked up to dear Isaac, who was watching some giraffe walk past, controlled my desire to scream a warning to him, and darted him. And he passed out. And none of the other baboons saw. I was so excited that I kissed him on the forehead, and then spent the rest of the day fretting with guilty concern every time he groaned or shifted or farted—heart attack, allergic reaction, darting-induced flatulence? We both recovered from the darting just fine.
And I darted more and more baboons, thought like a baboon, had baboon on my breath, was soon up to my ears in baboon blood samples and fecal smears and dental casts and all sorts of neat things. Then, expectedly, the process got harder and harder. The darting itself turned out to be trivial, the process of pointing a blowgun at someone’s rear and causing the dart to reach there. It was getting to the point of darting. The baboons just got more and more wily. I could no longer just walk up to someone and dart him. Instead, I had to become increasingly surreptitious, so that the baboons didn’t know it was coming, didn’t have an anticipatory stress response. The baboons began to differentiate between a blowgun and a walking stick. They could tell if I was inhaling to dart or to sneeze, and hit the dirt for the former. I started to have to dart from behind bushes. They would start doubling back on me, we’d circle around a tree, the target one step ahead. They figured out my darting range, knew it was shorter in the wind. They could probably tell if I had a chest cold and was taking shallower breaths. It was uncanny.
Things got increasingly complicated. I took to darting from vehicles. I would have to switch vehicles when they learned one. Soon, I would have friends drive the Jeep, while I hid in the back. Decoys, extra vehicles. Southern-sheriff sunglasses to keep the baboon from seeing where you’re looking, trying to look out the side of your head. Ski masks, a plastic Halloween mask that made it nearly impossible to use the blowgun. Complex schemes, hiding behind tourist cars, stakeouts hours in advance, hoping the baboons would pass by me before nightfall. On one memorable day’s darting, I came up to Joshua, sitting behind a bush on top of a mound. I rolled the Jeep to the front of the bush, he moved to the back end. I moved the Jeep to the back, he shifted to the front. This went on for a while. Finally an inspiration—rolled the Jeep to the back, he moved front. Put the Jeep in neutral, slithered out the far side, went to the back, and pushed. The Jeep rolled forward down the mound, he moved backward straight into my trap. One baboon darted, one Jeep hood dented from rolling into a tree.
A peculiar thing happens under these sorts of circumstances. You find yourself, a reasonably well educated human with a variety of interests, spending hours and hours each day and night obsessing on how to outmaneuver these beasts, how to think like them, how to think better than them. Usually unsuccessfully. Your mind runs wild with unlikely schemes, using hang gliders, hot air balloons, mannequins, being wheeled through the forest hidden in a perambulator. During those difficult times, at least I could take pride in what I consider to be one of my greatest points of professionalism in this venture: I have yet to take out an innocent bystander—I’ve never darted the wrong baboon. People get their money’s worth when they hire me for a contract.
Oddly, people started hiring me to do just that—come to their research site, collaborate in their studies by darting their baboons. Suddenly, a whole new pressure—assembly-line darting. Instead of having an entire season to lollygag around with the baboons and pick them off in between days of just collecting behavioral data, you show up at some new research site, don’t know a baboon there or the terrain, and have to get twelve in the next week. Big complex productions involving teams of people from the new research site. In one place, we would follow the baboons off cliffs where they slept down to the plains where they foraged each day—the researchers at that site whom I had trained to dart and I going after baboons on the plain, spotters up on the cliffs, waving flags to indicate where in the bush the darted animals had gone. Walkie-talkies, semaphores, great fun.
So I was on my way to honing my life’s vocation. And it was right around that time that I had my most disastrous darting ever.
It was a perfect darting of Uriah, shortly before he laid siege to Solomon. He was snoozing in the forest, back to me, long good shot, had the gun away before he could turn around. He jumped up, ran about ten steps, and sat down again. Everything going fine. Then, suddenly, twenty feet to the right, Joshua knocked over an impala, a small one, grazing in the forest. Impalas are usually too big for a single death bite to the neck. Instead, the typical game plan is to just knock them down and hold them while you eat them alive, everyone else all over you for a piece, so you’d better be more concerned about your compatriots than bothering to kill the impala; it’s not going anywhere. Joshua brings down the impala and Uriah is up in a shot, wrestles Joshua, and comes up with the impala. Shit, disaster. He’s off and running into the forest with four big guys after him. They all wrestle, I’m praying that he loses it so the pressure is off him, he can just go and get stupid on the anesthetic quietly. Instead, he holds on to the impala—I’m panicked, the minute he starts weakening from the anesthetic, he’s going to get ripped apart; males are unbelievably aggressive fighting over a kill. He wrestles, runs with it, and barrels into this tiny corner of the riverbed, into a thick clump of thorn bushes that has only a single entrance—effectively, a small enclosed cave with one opening, a bunch of branches with about a one-foot clearance on the bottom. He holes up in there, you can hear the impala screaming bloody hell inside, and any of the males who go near the entrance get Uriah flinging himself at them. They have to squeeze through on their bellies into the cave, which puts them at a major disadvantage; Uriah’d be on them before they’d even get up.
So here’s the problem: I have to get Uriah out of his little bush cave soon, because if the other males can get at him, they’re going to rip him apart if he’s half-conscious. But if I go into that cave when he’s more than half-conscious, he’s going to rip me apart, as he’s in an aggressive frenzy himself. Everyone is standing around outside, agitated, threatening me as I go near the entrance. The impala is still screaming, so I finally decide if it’s yelling so healthfully, Uriah must be asleep in there, hasn’t killed it yet. I jump up and down, yelling and gesticulating, to scare away everyone else. Clutching my syringes and catheters for blood sampling, I psych up and slowly slide into the cave on my back, waiting to be attacked. Get inside the tiny space, about three feet high, and find that Uriah is sound asleep, slumped down on the thoroughly alive impala, whose stomach has been ripped open.
Now that I’m inside, safe and sound with the snoozing Uriah, it occurs to me that there is no way either of us is coming out safely unless the impala goes out the sole exit to the waiting dinner crowd first. I ponder the moral implications of my being a central actor in that particular drama for a while as the male tumult begins to build up outside again. The shaft of light coming into the cave is occluded—someone is beginning to crawl in. I hoot loudly once and the shadow disappears. This seems likely to be only a temporary respite; I’d better do something. In the middle of all these worries, I suddenly become concerned about saving my stupid experiment on Uriah, i.e., getting a blood sample from him before it is too late to use the data. With assured and calm movements, I roll Uriah over for a sample, completely forgetting something critical—the impala. It’s up in a shot, kicking, flailing, sharp goddamn hooves. It kicks me in the forehead, knocking me back, opening up a big gash. I can’t believe it—I’d forgotten about the impala. Here I am, figuring out a way to avoid all this craziness with these mad aggressive male baboons and I’m about to be killed by Bambi. The impala is bellowing, all the males immediately outside start screaming bloody hell, I give up my composure and start yelling my head off also. The impala is trying to bash through the other side of the thorn bush, no luck, kicking again at my face. Finally, I freak out, convinced it’s about to kill me, which is not out of the question in that small a space. I jump on it and I believe I actually strangle it. I was so frantic I was definitely flailing it around, bashing its head on the ground. Then a profoundly chilling moment: I had to get the impala out of there. Start pushing it on the ground, now a dead weight, under the branches through the opening. Heavy, lots of friction, as it moves along the thorny ground, and suddenly, as I am slowly, slowly pushing it out—the sensation of its heavy body moving forward faster than I am pushing it—there is a primate hand on the impala’s shoulder, pulling on it. The carcass flies away, is gone. Wild fighting and screaming outside as four males converge on it, playing steal the bacon. I’m terrified someone is going to try to hide in here with the carcass, but they all seem to remember that something strange is happening in this bush cave and they tear around outside instead. I huddle inside in terror, get my wits about me, and take blood from Uriah. Thirty minutes of tumult and yelling and snarling outside, shadows blowing past; hunker down there with the contentedly snoring Uriah until the carcass is done and everyone moves off. Uriah and I go and take a nap in the Jeep.
So went my worst darting ever. Kind of a silly way to spend one’s time. But writing nearly two decades later, darting remains in my blood. The other night, I was at the movies and watched some matron amble down the aisle past me, and my first thoughts were “85–90 kilos, .9cc’s of anesthetic. Go for her rump, lots of meat. Her husband will probably defend her when she goes down, but he has small canines.” I am still delighted to be doing this for a living.
4
The Masai Fundamentalist and My Debut as a Social Worker
Sure, it was great getting to hang out with a bunch of baboons, but the rest of the novel world I had flung myself into that first year was pretty interesting as well, and at the top of the list of amazing things for me to assimilate was having Masai as my neighbors. Most of Kenya never was a National Geographic special, and much of what still is is fast disappearing. Of the forty or so distinct tribes in the country, perhaps thirty of them are made up of agriculturalists, most of them ethnically Bantu—farmers eking out a living on the terraced slopes of their overpopulated mountains with one or two members of each extended family in the cash economy, trying to get the money for a first bicycle, watch, or pair of jeans, or to replace the traditional grass thatch roof with tin. These people are abundantly aware that there is an outside world and occasionally get enough of a glimmer of what that might mean so as to fervently want a piece of it for themselves and their kids.
But in the far corners of the country are the handful of tribes who are not trying to change, who have not yet become embarrassed by who they are. On the coast, by the Indian Ocean, are the Swahili Muslim tribes whose antiquity and culture and self-assurance put anything in the West to shame. Pushed into the remaining tracts of thick rain forests are the last hunter-gatherers, ethnically related to the Pygmies and Bushmen in other parts of Africa—silent, diminutive, graceful people whose ancient lifestyle predates the invention of agriculture, predates the dominating influx of the Bantu tribes.
And in the parts of the country often regarded as open, howling wastelands are the nomadic pastoralists. Wanderers, contemptuous of hunting, contemptuous of farming, those in the north living off the blood and milk of camels and goats, and in the more benign southern grasslands of my baboons, off of the blood and milk of their cows. It is a pattern repeated throughout Africa—the Zulu of South Africa, the Watutsi of Rwanda, the Dinkas of Sudan, and, as the most likely to grace the cover of some Out of Africa coffee table book, the Masai of my neck of the woods. All of them ethnically and linguistically related; tall, angular Cushitic or Nilo-Hamitic people. Regal, aloof, intensely clannish, warlike as hell, raiding and plundering the agricultural tribes of whatever area they were passing through since time immemorial. I’ve always been intensely charmed by a theory that has floated around for years that way back when, a couple of millennia ago, the ancestors of all of these cow people were a garrison of Sudanese soldiers on the southern edge of the decaying Roman Empire—there is apparently some support for this idea in the clan and military organization of all of these tribes, as well as in the patterns of some of their military regalia. They happened to wander south a bit down the Nile, discovered that the agriculturalists were pushovers, and just kept wandering, until they had spread out all over the continent.
The Masai certainly fit that pattern. They had appeared on the Kenyan scene somewhere in the nineteenth century, wandering down from the northern deserts and wreaking havoc among everyone in their path. By the turn of the century, they had pretty much displaced the local Kikuyu farmers from the central highlands of Kenya, the lush heartland of the agricultural region. Today, a century later, the rivers and mountains of that region still bear Masai names.
Inconveniently, the Masai had usurped the Kikuyu just around the time that the Brits had started flexing their colonial muscles with plans to do the same. The Kikuyu seemed like altogether more reasonable people to steal land from than the Masai. Things might have turned nasty, requiring a bit of a dust-up, had not a jolly good pandemic intervened to help enforce Pax Britannia. In 1898, a staggering outbreak of a cattle disease called rinderpest occurred, killing about 80 percent of the cows and, as a result, a big chunk of the Masai as well. That took a bit of wind out of the sails of the famed warriors, making them altogether more docile negotiating adversaries. In 1906, the Brits concluded a treaty with the Masai. In exchange for giving up the plush central highlands, the Masai would get not one but two promised lands, one a desiccated track of grassland in the north, the other, my baboons’ grassland of the south, plus a corridor linking the two to facilitate cattle drives. Swell deal; the Masai decamped. Within a few years, the Brits had taken away the northern land plus the now superfluous corridor, everyone squeezed into the southern grasslands, which turned out to have pretty substantial amounts of cattle sleeping sickness. Even though the Masai would continue to this day to be ferociously predatory toward their immediate neighbors, never again would they pose the threat of occupying some land that the Brits had measured out for a cricket pitch.
