It’s late July and the dry season’s in full swing in Kenya’s Maasa Mara — one of Africa’s most biodiverse wildlife conservation areas set some 70 kilometers north of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. The rains are still a few weeks off and the earth is bone dry beneath the sprawling grassland butting against a sky straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. This is what the wildebeests have come for — the nutritious green oat grass pushing up from the hard scrabble ground that covers hundreds of miles of ridges, ravines and plains.
It’s the first thing we see, riding out at dawn as the sun starts to wake the long, grey horizon. Everything is grass and sky. My hair is whipping like crazed wind as I stick my head out the windowless olive green land rover that’s racing like a wild rhino into the bush, off a narrow dirt road that's barely bigger than the elephant paths zigzagging across the savanah. I’m sweeping my hand across the tops of the grass — breathing the musky scent of a land warming with wild grass, lemon-scented lippia javanica and the copious orange-leafed croton bushes that act as a natural insect repellent for the lions, which rest and feast in the shade of these bushes all afternoon. This is the land of the Maasai, an ethnic group known for their litheness, dignity, intelligence, bright red tunics, intricate beadwork.
I am taken on a long walk through the bush, which strangely seems to be focused on identifying types of dung. It's severywhere — from the dark pellets of the impala and wildebeest to the larger, rounder specimens of lions and cape buffalo, to the mountainous elephant mounds to the pure white peat-like hyena droppings to the pungent rhino offerings dumped in the open-air latriines of the wending rivers. It’s hard to tell where scent, sound and color begin in this landscape. The longer you’re out in the bush, the more the land and sky trick the eye and ear — dissolving into a kind of sensory song — hot earth and stone, the long drone of insects in the grass, the vast cloud-domed sky, the wilderbeests honking like great flocks of geese across the plains.
My Maasai guide and driver, William, points to a distant herd of elephants plodding back from foraging in the savanna all night. They’re headed to the cool quiet of a nearby riverine forest where they’ll wait out the hot afternoon. The herd trundles along the distant ridge — trunks raised like small black commas against the sweep of a pale pink sky. There are scattered lone desert date trees and acacias with umbrella tops. Lone birds perch on bare branches silhouetted against a sky. The vultures are on the lookout for the next meal.We find it with them, soon enough.
William has just spotted a cluster of other land rovers up a hill. Pulling close, we see two hyenas tearing at a fresh-killed wildebeest — dragging the bloodied white stomach sack to the ground like firm jello, loudly crushing the bones in powerful jaws. The crook-necked griffon vultures and the hulking malibu storks hop closer, ringing the carcass and two blood-soaked hyenas like a scene from MacBeth. Dozens are patiently watching and waiting their turn, others locked in tugs of war over strips of meat. This land is bright-boned and unforgiving. Everything here yields to the basics of survival.
For instance, the cubs that are born to their lioness mothers. There is a group coming down a small hill, their tawny fur blending with the the tall grass. There are about 10 cubs and three adults and they’re hungry, my guide says. He worries that the wildebeest — visible by the hundreds in the distance — are still too far off, in another territory. They might as well be in another country. Lagging at a growing distance is another cub, limping, starting to head in the wrong direction from its straggling siblings. My guide assures me that the mom will return. But we'll never know. Because William is gunning the gas again. We're off.
“It’s got you,” smiles Rulf, the manager of the camp, as he stops by while I down the last of my coffee at breakfast. His parents and grandparents have lived on this land, where he was raised. It’s the final morning and I’m getting ready to head to Nairobi, then to the States. I’ve been trying to explain the feeling of this song, how the land has a palpable presence, a certain feeling. “It’s in the medulla — the primitive brain,” Rulf says, reminding me that after all — here we are, smack in the cradle of civilization, where mankind sprung into existence.
Down below, in the thin trickle of the Telek river about 30 feet below Naibor Camp, where I’m still sitting at the breakfast table, a hippo bellows from a wading pool that has avoided evaporation during the long dry spell. It surfaces every few minutes, showing its massive hump of a grey back and two small round ears and beady eyes. A crocodile’s snout floats by, barely discernible in the murky water. I have to stare intently before I’m sure of what I’m seeing. It’s like so much in this land. When you’re first on the move as the day inches open — everything fills with quiet. There’s hardly any sign of discernible life. Then slowly, the landscape starts to wake. And you start waking, too, seeing the land, the sky, on the move. How the land has a rhythm — a song. Moving through the grass, riding for hours beneath the great blue iris of sky -- the ravines and trees resonate with a memory. And so, you remember.
