Dreams from My Father

Dedicated. If we could just build a training hospital, some decent facilities, we could triple their number in no time. And then…”
    “And then?”
    He turned toward the campfire, and I thought his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he said. “Sins of the father, you know. I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me.
    “I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent.
             
    Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky.
    It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcrusted backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water’s surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.
    And most of all the stillness, a silence to match the elements. At twilight, not far from our camp, we came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest. And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death. If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word—that time before Babel.
    At night, after dinner, we spoke further with our Masai guardsmen. Wilson told us that both he and his friend had recently been
moran,
members of the bachelor class of young warriors who were at the center of the Masai legend. They had each killed a lion to prove their manhood, had participated in numerous cattle raids. But now there were no wars, and even cattle raids had become complicated—only last year, another friend had been shot by a Kikuyu rancher. Wilson had finally decided that being a
moran
was a waste of time. He had gone to Nairobi in search of work, but he had little schooling and had ended up as a security guard at a bank. The boredom drove him crazy, and eventually he had returned to the valley to marry and tend to his cattle. Recently one of the cattle had been killed by a lion, and although it was illegal now, he and four others had hunted the lion into the preserve.
    “How do you kill a lion?” I asked.
    “Five men surround it and throw their spears,” Wilson said. “The lion will choose one man to pounce. That man, he curls under his shield while the other four finish the job.”
    “It sounds dangerous,” I said stupidly.
    Wilson shrugged. “Usually there are only scratches. But sometimes only four will come back.”
    The man didn’t sound like he was boasting—more like a mechanic trying to explain a difficult repair. Perhaps it was that nonchalance that caused Auma to ask him where the Masai thought a man went after he died. At first, Wilson didn’t seem to understand the question, but eventually he smiled and began shaking his head.
    “This is not a Masai belief,” he said, almost laughing, “this life after you die. After you die, you are nothing. You return to the soil. That is all.”
    “What do you say, Francis?” Mauro asked.
    For some time Francis had been reading a small, red-bound Bible. He looked up now and smiled. “These Masai are brave men,”