The Amboseli is empty and silent. It is not the comfortable emptiness and silence of a lazy savannah afternoon, when the big cats are resting away from the heat of a December summer, and their prey has a few hours of respite from the depredations of hungry predators. There are few raptors gliding and soaring on the thermals overhead, looking for an unattended kill to feast on. No, the Amboseli is empty and silent because of the carnage that is evident at ground level. The stench of death is everywhere. It is sometimes faint, carried only on the wisps of wind and the dust devils that dance on the dusty, dry earth. But sometimes the stench is thick and unmistakeable, especially when you get close to the carcasses, lying here and there and everywhere. There is wildlife everywhere you look, except that the term is a cruelly misleading one, because the wild animals are dead. There are wildebeeste as far as the eye can see, but they are lying on their side, the life long gone and only their dessicated bodies left. They are joined by the carcasses of zebras and antelopes and other victims of the long, cruel, unending drought. There are also reports of elephants, felled not by greedy poachers, but by an environment that can no longer support them. They lie where they fall, their magnificent tusks bearing witness to a long life now suffocated out of these wondrous giants.
There are rumours that it has rained in the Chyulus, many miles and many days of walking away. The rumours are not carried only through human mouths and into human ears. The animals of the Amboseli have their ways. They can sense and smell the temporary bounty of the Chyulus, which is why they all head that way, and leave the safety of the Amboseli to their deceased fellows. The surviving elephants head for those hills, as do the zebras and antelopes and wildebeeste that can make the trek. They hope to gather where there is rain and grass to be had, if only to try to make it until the rains are strong and steady enough that they may return to a resuscitated Amboseli.
But others have seen and heard of the rain in the Chyulus, and they also head for the hills so that they and their herds may survive. The rumours in this case are relayed by mobile phone, but the trek is as long and as arduous as that of the silent ones. So they head for the Chyulus as well, and the cows and goats and sheep that survive may have refreshed sustenance. But of course all these herds, both wild and domestic, are heading for the same limited pasture. In years gone past, they may have managed to do so in some semblance of tense harmony, with each species finding some space in which to graze. But now, desperation colours every interaction. Since the Chyulus are just about the only grazing area holding an entire ecosystem together, there is more tension than harmony.
There have been other droughts before. The rains have failed before, and the herds have died before. But this one seems to be worse. It is not only covering a wider area, but it also comes after back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back failed rainy seasons. Normally, the heaviest rains are supposed to take place between March and May, and in school we had to learn the fact of what were called the long rains. But these long rains have not been seen in their proper quantities for at least five seasons. The elders say that they have never seen anything like this. Lest you doubt what you may assume to be their clouded memories, the scientists give their own version of their own wisdoms. They say that they started collecting reliable data at the turn of the 1950s, and it has never been this bad. That is three quarters of a century’s worth of data, confirming what the eye can see, what the nose can smell, and what the ears fail to hear.
My friend Saruni is an affable, ever smiling man. When Sam and I tease him that he has never so much as invited us to his home and slaughtered a goat for us, he promises us that next time he will do it. Lakini wewe ukija Nairobi hatuwezikosa kukuchinjia, hata kama tutaendea mbuzi sokoni, we tell him. He takes the challenge, and promises us that we will have ribs from his flock, unlike us who have to buy the goat for slaughter from the market. Later, we take a game drive. This is the same game drive that is so silent and so odoriferous. We are lucky to come across a family of cheetah, which are busy with a late-afternoon dinner they have just felled. Pilipili, our driver and guide, tells us that the kills are easier now, with the prey being so emaciated. But during the game drive, Saruni is on the phone constantly, trying to arrange veterinary care for his herds in the faraway Chyulus. His herdsmen have also sought solace there, and the reports of a dying bull lend gravity to Saruni’s ever more urgent phone calls.
We challenge him. Has this never-ending drought changed the thinking of our Maasai people? Have the dead herds perhaps put pause to the centuries of accumulation of cows as wealth and status symbol? Saruni is genuinely torn. He speaks hopefully of perhaps maintaining a smaller herd. Perhaps stocking up with the cross breed between the Sahiwal and the domestic herds of the Maasai. But he needs to maintain precious bloodlines. He knows that if he walks into the watering hole owning a herd of a mere twenty or fifty beasts, he will be unwelcome at the table of the real men who own three hundred.
The endless lands of the Maasai are also changing. Where vast group ranches meant that animals could move from one area to another, following pasture as it became available, these have now been divided. City people in their big 4x4s are now showing up, with the hunger for the small plots that are being sold off as the group ranches are subdivided. And city people will do what city people do. They will put up fences and post guards to keep away intruders from their property. The fences that mean that the age-old movement of cattle and wildlife is now squeezed into a ever-tighter funnel.
The Maasai can see this. Those who are able to, are looking at this subdivision askance, and are making an effort to marry the old ways with the new demands and the new hungers. They try to ensure that the herding grounds are maintained, and that the wildlife still has an adequate dispersal area even as the pressure from the city people becomes ever harder to resist. Saruni’s dilemma is a shared one, but one that he and others who are equally discerning hope to resolve successfully.
The next morning, we are on our way to the villages abutting the Amboseli. The remaining herds here are thin and scrawny. Some of the cows have painful scars, which we assume are the result of an opportunistic bovine illness. No, we are told that this is the result of the constant effort by the herdsmen to lift the cows up when they fall, as they struggle to support themselves in their frailty. Later, at a distance, I see a cow with a what seems to be a curiously scarlet hide. Have my Maasai relatives painted the cow? Is it medicine? No - I am told that oxpeckers ride on the cattle and jab and poke at the cow’s suppurating wounds. They are not doing this out of any barbaric instinct. No, the oxpeckers do what oxpeckers have always done - ride on bovines and dine on whatever insects and dead skin are on the buffalo and cattle they live with in symbiosis. In this case, though, each peck and nip and jab and poke is agonising to the cow, so the Maasai use their red shukas to cover the animal and save it from this torture.
We drive back to Nairobi. The carnage is all around us. Through the plains of Imbirikani and Selengei and Mashuru, into Isinya and Kajiado and Olooloitikosh, and almost into Enoomatasiani and Ngong, the dead herds and the smell of death follow us. Here and there, herdsmen and farmers have tried to burn the carcasses. Perhaps to prevent death and disease. Perhaps in a forlorn attempt to give dignity to the dead beasts. Perhaps in inadvertent sacrifice, so that the rain may return.
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