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Then, after we have resumed our herding, the notebook again: "Cows (11:54 a.m.) smell lion and start bawling loudly. They smell fresh lion urine. Moses sees it, pts to spot with spear. Still wet. Lions must be downwind from us now. Cow horns all went up exactly at once when they smelled. Hot noon sun. Moses laughing. Cows still afraid, horns up, smelling. WE CHASE THREE LIONS through forest. One growls. They get away thru bush and olive trees. We chase for 150 yds. and they have slipped away. This is somewhat dangerous business."
What happened was that we saw three lions, and Moses suddenly came alive in the purest spontaneous act. The presence of the lions brought Moses electrically alert. The damndest thing. The lions brought the visitor electrically alert as well, though with less self-confidence.
Moses seemed to become, all at once, everything that he ought to be -- which was what the lions were as well: exactly lions. Moses vibrated with a current that contained no thought or premeditation. There was nothing in him of the third eye or the conscience or the sense of sin, but only an animal impulse to kill the lion. Moses went springing after the lion as the lion springs after the wildebeest.
We saw the lions running through the trees. Then they vanished. On general principles, lions are afraid of the Masai. They scurried ignominiously into the forest, not wishing to test Moses. Moses strode back from the olive trees and remarked, "Lucky lions."
Moses and Olentwala practiced throwing the rungu. Then they lazed for a time under the trees. Out of the sun, East Africa cools by 10 degrees or 15 degrees F. Altitude and breeze and shade. Moses, showing off, undertook to make fire. He found a piece of cedar, planed the top, and with his Masai sime (short sword) bored a starting fire hole. He cut a twirling stick and found the seedpod needed to catch and preserve the fire. Then he and Olentwala set about the rubbing, and soon they had a little smoking seed of flame in Moses' palm.
East Africa is a paradise, but one capable of ominous effects: nature's sweet morning, but also an awful mess, a killing field. The peaceable kingdom is dung covered and bone littered, its graceful life subject to sudden violent extinctions. A high turnover. Life is to be stalked and slain, almost abstractly, and ingested. These days, the death is also to be photographed. The tourist minibuses cluster around a cheetah kill. The late 20th century forlornly suckles on the Pleistocene. The whites popping through the roofs of the vehicles like blossoms from a vase will glare at one another with the hatred of one whose dream has been interrupted.
Among the wild animals, individual life has no claims. What matters is something collective, the species, the tribe, the march of genes: the drive of life, and its dreamlike indifference to the details of individual death. The Great Chain of Eating. Nature at this level is bloody and sloppy, faintly horrifying and very beautiful.