(8 of 18)
The skeleton of an elephant lies out in the grasses near a baobab tree and a scattering of black volcanic stones. The thick-trunked, gnarled baobab gesticulates with its branches, as if trying to summon help. There are no tusks lying among the bones, of course; ivory vanishes quickly in East Africa. The elephant is three weeks dead. Poachers. Not far away, a baby elephant walks alone. That is unusual. Elephants are careful mothers and do not leave their young unattended. The skeleton is the mother, and the baby is an orphan.
One day in Meru, the Land Cruiser glides through the lion-colored grasses. It is late afternoon, and lions everywhere are rising from their long day's slumber to think about hunting. The driver, a Masai named Simeon K. Londaga, sees the lion and stops and points. Poking his head like a periscope through the roof of the Cruiser, the visitor follows the line of Simeon's finger and gets lost out there in the grasses. He squints as if dialing the eyes to better focus, as if trying to build the platonic lion out of grass. Still the lion will not come. The beast is hidden in the grass like the number in the dot test for color blindness. Rake your gaze into the grass again, staring deeply into it, and slowly the scene develops like a Polaroid picture, taking color and form. The eyes discover that they are staring straight, deeply, into the eyes of a lion -- only the eyes. And the lion is staring straight and deeply back. The eyes in the grass are yellow-black eyes, cat's eyes, emitting rays of measurement and judgment and hunger. "Only you, mzungu!" say the eyes. Mzungu is Swahili for white man. The visitor feels the chill of a savage attention. At last the Polaroid develops itself fully. The lion turns and lies in full view, spreading the beige grass and lying precisely in the posture of the woman in the grass in Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World. The grasses in Wyeth's dream and the grasses garnishing the lion have the same color and texture. But whereas Wyeth's Christina was crippled and lay in an unforgettable posture of longing, of groping, the lion, his hindquarters lazing off on one side, is a masterwork of indolent power. All utterly what he was, all lion.
One night around a fire inside the boma, Moses recounted some of his dreams. In one of them, he runs up a ravine with steep rock walls on three sides, pursued by a rhino. He claws at the rock walls, trying to escape, hanging by his fingertips. He wakes up screaming. In another dream, a lion is dragging Moses through deep grass. Moses desperately clutches at the grass with his fingers, but the grass comes up in clumps, and Moses is dragged on.
One afternoon Moses and his guest came to the Morijo Loita Primary School, a windswept arrangement of tin-roofed buildings on a bare hillside a few miles from Moses' boma. Several dozen schoolchildren were gathered in a classroom of the sort that made one think of the places where Abraham Lincoln went to school on the Indiana frontier. The children sat in rows at long crude benches. They were asked about their encounters with the wild animals, in reality and in dreams. A boy named Seketo told of being chased by a lion once while he was herding cows. But he said normally when a boy meets a wild animal, the solution is simple: the boy runs one way and the animal runs another, and both are happy.