(15 of 18)
John Hall has been a cattle rancher on the Laikipia Plateau for 23 years. The safari guide, Chrissie Aldrich, brought the visitor up from Nanyuki to Hall's Enasoit Ranch. Hall's neighbors regard him as an eccentric because he gives the wild animals the free run of his ranch. At one time, he and his wife Thelma had a large lovely garden in their front yard, but the elephants systematically demolished it. Hall says cheerfully that he decided to enjoy watching the elephants instead of watching his flowers.
"The elephants are quite considerate, really," says Hall. There is a cabbage tree next to his house. "The elephants pushed down all of the other cabbage trees here, but they left that one standing, because they did not want it to fall on the house." A pride of seven or eight lions lives on his spread. Hall says that the lions do not have a strong appetite for beef, and besides, if they should kill a cow, it is a tax write-off. Twenty years ago, he did have to shoot a lion, one that had killed 46 of his cows. The lion's skin hangs on the living-room wall.
Hall could make more money if he chased the wild animals off his land. "But this is the last of the game," he says, speaking intensely. "So at all costs you must forfeit money to save it. It doesn't look very hopeful for the game, but you mustn't give up. I will fight to the last." That vibration is heard again and again: "Cattle can be replaced anytime, but the game cannot. What right have we to eliminate game? I would eliminate all humans and leave it to the wildlife."
Hall began farming years ago in Nottinghamshire, England. He is a rangy, bearded man who looks like D.H. Lawrence without the haunted introversion. "I always craved wilder conditions," Hall says, matter-of-factly. "I just don't like civilization in any form." The sight of a paved road incenses him.
A wounded Cape buffalo once chased Susan and John Hall into the house. One day a large male baboon pursued Thelma Hall down the veranda and into the house. The baboon came inside after her. She remembers its awful yellow fangs. John Hall came after the baboon with his shotgun, but the gun jammed. Hall jabbed with the gun butt, and the baboon started chewing it up. Finally, Hall whacked the baboon on the head with the gun butt, and it ran under a bed, where Hall finally shot it.
Thelma Hall has begun writing poems about the animals, especially about the elephants. One of the poems ends: "I was always taught/ There are fairies at the bottom of the garden./ At the bottom of our garden/ There are elephants!"
Moses and Olentwala and the American set off from the boma one morning to spend the day out in the hills with 140 head of high-humped Boran cattle. Moses carried his long-bladed lion-killing spear. Olentwala, a man in his early 20s who had never been a warrior, carried a less lethal-looking spear, lighter, with less metal on the killing end. They held in their left hands the club-shaped rungu and a walking stick of olive wood.
Moses, like all other serious students of African bushcraft, is a reader of droppings, an analyst and commentator on dung. As he and Olentwala whistled the cattle along, he remarked now and then on the evidence that lay in the forest paths and meadows. Here a Dik-dik passed in the early morning. There a waterbuck had paused. Everywhere in East Africa such expertise is encountered.