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Baboon life, says Strum, is an endless series of negotiations. The drama of their lives revolves not around sex or male intimidation but around alliances, around friendships. Baboons have a Japanese complexity of deferences and dominances. They live, it seems to a newcomer, in a constant state of distracted tension, as if caught in an elastic web of attractions and repulsions, a web constantly in motion, in adjustment of distances. The visitor studies their hands, which are so human, so adept and articulate that they could be trained for neurosurgery if good hands were all that a neurosurgeon needed.
Now a magic evening light comes across the Laikipia Plateau, and the baboons straggle in from their day's browsings among the acacia flowers. They sit and socialize on the lower rocks of their high kopje, grooming one another with a sweet absorption, playing with their babies. Like almost everyone and everything in Africa, they seem profoundly tribal. Another troop of baboons arrives, 100 yards away, and each tribe stares at the other with a nervous intensity across the lovely evening light.
It is time to begin the six-hour drive from Nairobi to Moses' enk'ang (small village) in the Loita Hills. The Land Cruiser travels for three hours over paved road to the dusty frontier town of Narok, then follows a rutted washboard road across an empty and chokingly dusty plain until it shifts into four-wheel drive and begins the slow climb up into the hills. It is lovely in the hills. They look somewhat like the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. Part of their beauty is their pristine remoteness. One rarely encounters a white man there.
The visitor came first to the enk'ang of Moses' older brother Joseph, who, surrounded by children and dogs and friends, strode out from the boma -- a tall thorn-and-cedar enclosure, the feudal African fortress against lions and leopards -- to meet him. Joseph was smaller and more delicately boned than Moses. He had the fine, intelligent head of a Talmudic scholar, the visitor decided, an Ethiopian head, a fastidious head, given to complex distinctions. Joseph and the visitor set out in the evening light to walk across the hills to Moses' boma. Joseph wore a handsome red blanket hung over his shoulder like a toga and, oddly, a suede golf cap that suited him well. He was barefoot, his feet tough and thick as they trod upon rocks and twigs and thorns and dung indifferently.
Joseph was asked if there were any wild animals close by. He did not carry a spear just now, only a thin wand of olive wood. The spear was not necessary at this time of day between bomas, Joseph explained. People passed back and forth; the lions would stay away.
Joseph talked, when asked, about the Masai diet. Milk, tea. Some maize. Goat or beef on special occasions. Do the Masai ever eat the wild animals? Joseph answered, "Sometimes we eat the gazelle, because the gazelle is close to God."
Joseph's accent had a strange geographical range, with pronunciations in English that sounded as if they had come from either India or Germany. God came out sounding like the German Gott.
The roundheel quester from America gave a sigh of discovery. "Ah." Long pause.