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In dreams, the children were paralyzed by fright. A girl named Hyinka dreamed that when she went into the forest for firewood, a Cape buffalo attacked her and she tried to push her down with his horns. She could neither run nor scream. The buffalo pushed her into the water with his nose. Memusi had a dream about a lion's attacking and biting, and she tried to scream but could not. Lekerenka could not scream, either, when bitten in his dreams by a spitting cobra. He woke up crawling on the ground.
The visitor conceived a modest theory about dreams. The difference between the Kenya nightmares and the scary dreams of a five-year-old boy in New York City might be that the beasts of primal fantasy live just outside the Masai huts. The Masai reside, so to speak, in the psychic forest, where the wild things are. The beasts there were not invented by an illustrator. They are the originals. The lion roars in the Masai's sleep, and roars when the Masai awakes as well.
So to some extent, the world inside the skull corresponds to the world outside it, an interesting reconciliation. The inner eye and the outer eye may sometimes see the same image, the same dreamy beast standing under the fever tree. The sleeping and the waking become interchangeable. The actual and the psychic coincide.
The pen where Moses and his family kept their goats at night was covered with a grid of heavy wire. When a visitor wondered about it, Moses explained, "Leopard comes at night to take the goat." Around every Masai enk'ang is built a sturdy fence of thorn and cedar to keep the lions out. One day, walking in the forest, Moses shouldered an enormous slab of cedar to add to his boma. "The lion makes me do a lot of work," he remarked. Sometimes the barricades do not hold, and the Masai wake to the bawl and crashing of cattle as the lion struggles to carry off his beef.
Reality and dreams dance round to bite each other. One night when Joseph was still a boy, he and his friend dreamed the same dream, about a leopard attacking the calves. "We both woke up at the same time, screaming and fighting the leopard," Joseph said. "We both roared like the leopard, and then the whole boma woke up screaming" -- shouting about the leopard the boys had seen -- but had seen only in their dreams. And in the morning, by the goats' pen, the people found leopard tracks. "You know," said Joseph thoughtfully. "There are scary animals. And they eat people. Sometimes people never learn to be brave, and even as old men, they are still afraid."
One afternoon in the Loita Hills, there were three Masai warriors, called ilmurran, sitting in the shade beside a dung-walled hut. Their hair was long and greased with fat. They were barefoot and wore only the shuka, a bright- patterned piece of cloth, like a tablecloth, draped as a short toga around waist and shoulders. Their spears leaned against the wall of the hut, with their rungu -- knob-ended clubs that the Masai can throw with a fierce accuracy. One of the warriors, named David, spoke halting English. He was about 20 years old, although the Masai pay little attention to precise ages, since a boy's real life does not start until he is circumcised in mid- adolescence and thereby, with great ceremony, becomes a man.