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David translated for the others. David said that, yes, the warriors still obeyed Masai tradition by raiding other tribes for cattle. The Masai believe that in the beginning, God (Enkai) bestowed all the world's cattle upon the Masai. Therefore, when Masai warriors go down into Tanzania to raid a Kuria village and steal cows, they are merely taking back what already belongs to them.
How is a cattle raid carried out? "We come at dusk to the Kuria village," David said, "and make a lot of noise. There is a big fight, with spears, with bows and arrows. I have lost friends in raids, and think I have killed six or seven Kuria, although I cannot be sure because we leave quickly. We do not wait to see if they are dead. We take the cows away and drive them all night so we can be across the border in the morning when the army might come to start looking for us."
The government has often tried to domesticate the Masai, to get them to give up the path of the warrior. Some years ago, a colonial district officer named Clarence Buxton decided to try to substitute manly sports for cattle raiding. He conceived the idea of encouraging Masai warriors to play polo while mounted on donkeys. The plan did not go far.
The government forbids long hair and warrior business and lion hunting, but it is a huge country, and sometimes the government can manage to be only wistfully authoritarian.
One of the warriors was asked, "Is it easier to kill a man or a lion?"
The young man immediately answered, "Easier to kill a lion."
Why?
"It is hard to fight a man, because he is as clever as you are. He has arrows and a spear. He is as tricky as you are. And besides, a person has friends, and if you kill him, his friends can kill you! It is more complicated."
The young warrior is asked his name and replies, "Lord Delamere." His parents had named him Lord Delamere. The visitor tears a page out of his notebook and walks 30 yards away and places the paper on the ground, weighed down by a stone. His lordship is asked to demonstrate his accuracy with a spear. Lord Delamere shrugs and stands and hurls his spear, impaling the blank page. The visitor asks to borrow the spear so that he might try. Alas, he does not straighten his arm, as in a javelin throw, but starts the motion somewhere behind his right ear, as if throwing a fastball. The spear sails up, too high, and at the apex, points straight skyward, and then collapses in the air, subsiding downward on its butt, ignominiously, like one of the early failed rockets from Cape Canaveral. Lord Delamere would not wish to hunt lion with the American.
That night, while sleeping inside Moses' boma in the Loita Hills, the visitor dreamed that he raided cattle on West 57th Street in Manhattan. He loaded four stolen cows into a cattle trailer towed by an old Chrysler Imperial and drove them up across the Connecticut border.
Fifty Somali poachers armed with automatic weapons came nosing around the rhino refuge at Lewa Downs. "But we put out the message that if they came in, a few of them would have to die along with us," says Anna Merz. Under the driver's seat in her car, she carries a spike-headed club. She is not licensed to carry a gun, but she employs guards with old Enfield rifles to patrol her fenced-in 7,500-acre refuge, where approximately 16 rhinos live.