The Last Great Ape Read online

  Rain pounded the nylon roof. But pattered on the riverbank with a ghostly quiet. Was the canyon flooding? I stuck my head into the storm and shined the flashlight on the river and looked up at the cliff knowing I might have to climb. Rocks cracked upriver. Rock struck rock. Muffled. Then one second of silence. Then the sound, Brruuup, of a boulder dunking into the river. High overhead, the crack of rocks. Silence. Then the Brruuup of a diving boulder hitting the river with such force it sucked its splash into the water behind it. Brruuup Brruuup. The cliff was coming apart. I folded my legs against my chest, pressed my back to the tree against which I’d pitched my tent. It was all I had, one thin tree any boulder would obliterate. The tent tipped on its side in a gust of wind and nearly toppled into the river. I fought the wet walls off my face. Rocks crashed up and down the canyon, just meters away, and I saw my end, smashed in the tent as I cowered, afraid even to move my hands. What am I doing here? You didn’t come because you had something to prove? You didn’t, right? Or—no. I breathed. I said to myself, You are where you should be. This is the land you had to be a part of, and the land led you here. The night I measured in the uncountable times I thought the danger had passed, from cracking rock to cracking rock, one hope to the next, the promise of safety contained within each second. The rain finally lightened. The cliff began to hold. And I shivered in the darkness, hearing nothing but the whisper of water.

  I woke initiated. I felt it in breathing, in leaping along the river. God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars. The beauty of the day declared to me that I’d earned the right to belong here.

  The landscape was endless, devoid of signs of man.

  Near noon, I came finally to the muddy banks of Ewaso Nyiro, Brown River. Coughing and foodless, I slipped off my pack, peeled away my clothes and dunked a rock into the river, as the Maasai do, to scare the crocodiles. I rushed into the current, fell back in the water and opened my mouth to drink.

  When I climbed out, I pulled on underwear and scanned the gentle hills beyond the river, my cough sticky in my lungs. I toed into the water, balancing the backpack on my head, legs spread for balance, steps diagonal to the current. The water climbed as I inched across the muddy river bottom until I was on my tiptoes, the river at my chin and the backpack casting a shadow over my face. Farther out, when I brought my legs together to keep my mouth from going under, the current swept me off my feet. I swam—two seconds—and my strength failed under the weight of the pack. It splashed into the river, bobbed. I hooked an arm around it and side-stroked, struggled against the current that swept me downstream. I staggered up the far banks, heaving. Then threw myself across the sand.

  Three hours into the hills, I found a path. I scanned the gravel for footprints, for the tire marks of sandals. My backpack was still dripping. I fantasized about hot ugali and passing the night near a fire with a family in some togetherness still alive in the time after Ofer. The trail vanished; it had likely been carved by animals who were as indifferent as I to particular points in the landscape. I didn’t regret parting with Ofer, but the cost of solitude was clear.

  Snared in a bush was a shred of a red shuka. I walked up and over the next hill, gaining views of the dark rings of three bomas. “Sopa!” I called out as I neared a cattle herd. I raised my hands and stopped until I saw that the two young Maasai were smiling. They approached, bowed and leaned forward, and I placed my hand on their skulls. I followed in silence to the thorn-bush fence where men were gathering to welcome me. An elder took my hands and pulled me into the village.

  “Sopa sopa sopa,” I said.

  All eyes went to my waterlogged pack when I let it thud to the ground. A girl touched my hair and ran off laughing. Two old mamas seized my wrists and inspected my earrings. I sketched my route in the dirt with a stick and relayed the story in Swahili to the Maasai gathered in the cow dug, though I lacked the language to share how it’d felt surviving the storm. The direction I’d come surprised them: “the mountains.”

  A tall slim man in a striped shuka worked his way through the crowd.

  “Are you one of the lost ones?” he said, stroking his moustache.

  I laughed. “You speak English?”

  “Yes, the only one. They called me from another boma.”

  A boy picked up my backpack.

  “Let’s go,” the man said.

  A skeleton of sticks showed in the cracked mud walls of his manyatta.

  “My name is Isaac Ololkupai,” he said, ducking through the door into the dark hut. “Sit. I think you could use a cup of tea.”

  His sideways glance made clear he knew I needed more than tea.

  A fire burned within three rectangular stones forming a hearth that was almost a shrine. The smoke-stained poles holding up the roof were as dark and smooth as ebony. The scent of Isaac’s home reminded me of childhood when my father had returned from the army reserves and I’d rushed into his arms to absorb the smell of sweat from his uniform and beard. I pulled off my boots, and Isaac served me a cup and then a second cup of tea, his chest visible where his shuka was pulled back. He dragged a metal box across the dirt floor and opened a disintegrating photo album and pointed to a picture of a school forty kilometers away, just a day’s walk for a Maasai.

  “I was the one in the family my father chose to send to school,” said Isaac, who was in his thirties. He had a few grays curling in his hair. He pointed to a photograph of himself in trousers and a button-down shirt. “I got a job at Mara Sarova, the safari lodge.” Among pictures of villages was a photograph of Isaac at a computer. “I was there three years. I was good at my job. I was advancing. But I decided I had to come back here. I wanted to be with my father and herd cattle. This is my home. This,” Isaac said and motioned with his hands, “is worth far more than I had in the other world.”

  We walked that evening to the manyatta of his father. “My old man,” Isaac called him. He sat on a stool outside his hut, wielding a cow-tail flyswatter. The wrinkles and lines on his forehead were a checkerboard of decades, and age had given his skin a sheen of silver. I knelt before him, held his hands and said, “Sopa.”

  His eyes were milky with cataracts, his voice weak.

  “The old man says he dreamed of your arrival,” Isaac said, translating. “He says your arrival is a blessing to the village.”

  To talk with such a man was an honor that put to doubt one’s worthiness.

  I asked Isaac how to say “Grandfather” in KiMaasai.

  “Kakuya.”

  Still kneeling, gripping the elder’s cold, fragile hands, I thanked him. “Asante, Kakuya. Asante sana.”

  In a field among trees, Isaac taught me how to shoot a bow and arrow. He taught me the names and uses of plants and how to track animals from downwind and he encouraged me to practice Swahili with other Maasai. I laughed at how amazing it would have been to have Isaac beside me in boyhood helping to catch snakes. “Feel welcome,” Isaac seemed always to say. “Do what you want.”

  I’d seen Kakuya walking alone between bomas, slumped over but holding his head up, his shoulders thin as a shirt on a hanger. He had four wives.

  “How old is Kakuya?”

  “Nobody really knows,” Isaac said. “From the memories he has, we think he should be about ninety-four.”

  Kakuya was the only survivor of his age group, the oldest Maasai in the area, and he sat outside his house eating an ear of dry roasted corn, corn I could not chew, the difference in the hardness of our teeth a simple proof of the softness of modern ways.

  “Father, can I ask for your wisdom?” I said to Kakuya through Isaac.

  Kakuya smiled, nodded. His right earring looked like a tiny brass bell.

  “What’s the difference between the life today and the life of the Maasai when you were a child?”

  Kakuya spoke for several minutes. His soft, gravely voice seemed to have its source in a world barely heard. “In my time, the Maasai did not live in bomas. We were more nomads and had small
houses made of sticks and leather. It was a time of great bravery for the Maasai. We did have good relations with other tribes. The Luhya gave us steel. They knew how to work the steel. The Akamba made pottery and traded with us.”

  All I knew of the Akamba was that they were the best askaris in Nairobi.

  “When was the first time white men arrived?” I said.

  “I remember it well. I was very young. It was British soldiers who came. One soldier gave me a piece of hard candy, a sweet. He showed me to put it in my mouth.” Kukuya twisted up his face and reached into his mouth with two fingers. “The taste was horrible.” He pretended to yank out the candy and throw it down. “It’s the most horrible memory I had as a child.”

  Isaac laughed with the old man and said, “It’s the first time I’ve heard that story.”

  Kakuya’s enthusiasm to tell stories was as great as my desire to hear them, and we reached the point where I didn’t have to ask him questions. As Isaac listened to Kakuya before translating, I thought of the times I’d shushed cousins and aunts in an attempt to give Grandpa Moshe the stage he deserved to read the Saturday blessing. My family “felt sorry” for my grandfather because of his age. But to try to take care of him was an insult when they should have been listening.

  “The old man has given you a name,” Isaac said. “You are Lamayan. It means ‘The one who brings blessings.’”

  I thought, How on earth could I ever deserve this?

  Two weeks later, Isaac draped blankets over my shoulders and wrapped me in a shuka. “Lamayan, take this,” he said, handing me a smooth stick and then laughing. “I think we’re going to surprise a few people at the wedding.” We strode for hours on the savannah, long past dusk when I wouldn’t have walked alone. But Isaac, with his spear across his shoulders, was merely strolling in his neighborhood.

  Singing and drumming, barely audible, reached out to us from the vast night as we crossed a space that seemed not to be real. We arrived to a boma filled with men drinking honey wine and dancing with spears, shooting themselves into the air without bending their knees. The warriors, moran, who’d likely traveled a day or more to be together, did not notice me in the dark. Isaac put his arms at his sides and shot into the air and nodded for me to do the same. One by one, as I leapt, the Maasai met my gaze. Then jumped back with their spears. They slapped their knees and laughed when they saw Isaac. Many came to shake my hand and chat in Swahili or to talk to me through Isaac in KiMaasai. I felt as drunk after a single taste of wine as the moran who were dancing and stumbling as though they’d been at it since lunch. What a rush to be accepted by warriors. I wished my sister could see me, my sister who’d encouraged me to play electric guitar instead of breeding lizards.

  The celebration hardly paused for dawn. Men stayed in one boma, women in another. Outside the fence, elders sat on cow skins and prayed, oblivious to the commotion behind them. The groom was adorned in ochre, his hair, forehead and sideburns red. Half circles of ochre paint, like the scales on a reptile, decorated his bare legs above gray socks and dress shoes with the laces gone. The groom stood near his manyatta, waiting for the bride to arrive from her village.

  His mouth hung open as if his stomach were unsettled, and I approached. His father spoke for him, bragged about how long it had taken to arrange the marriage. With so many eyes on me, I couldn’t help but feel that my presence was a distraction and I backed away into the crowd.

  Cattle lazed in the dirt like overfed pets.

  The first of the bride’s caravan sang its way into the boma. The entourage was a festival of color, spectacular and showy against the brown earth. The bride had to be proud, I thought, for the communities that had traveled from the far corners of the bush to celebrate the creation of her family. I was falling in love with the Maasai, with their hospitality and patience, their connection to nature, the respect of elders and of children, their courage, pride, resilience and joy.

  The bride walked across the boma. Old women before her sprinkled liquid from calabashes onto the ground, a tradition incompatible with concrete. Discs of orange and blue ringed the bride’s neck, and the long spires of a beaded crown rose like feathers from her forehead. Her massive earrings were of the most impractical shapes.

  Song encircled the groom, and I thought again of my sister whose own time in the army, I hoped, was passing without pain and who would meet a good man someday for her own fine wedding. The mothers of the betrothed negotiated the dowry’s final terms while the bride waited outside the groom’s hut for the invitation to enter. A female relative carried a blue trunk on her back, held in place by a tump line, a trunk filled with gifts from the bride’s family for her new life. People sang and danced. The bride stood motionless, focused on the ground. She was beautiful, the ceremony magnificent. I moved through the dancers for a better view of her face. Silver chains curled under her cheekbones. Two silver pendants lay on the bridge of her nose. She was frowning. Her eyes were melancholic. She was in despair. And no one was consoling or helping her.

  Hours later, walking back to Isaac’s boma and feeling almost betrayed, I tried to hide my disappointment that the marriage seemed wrong.

  “Isaac,” I said, finally, “do you think the bride was sad?”

  “Yes.”

  His matter-of-fact answer clashed with the intensity of my emotions. “But why?”

  “She’d never seen her husband,” Isaac said as he loped through the grass beside me, spear in hand. “She hadn’t chosen her mother-in-law. Many times the mother-in-law is harsh with a young bride; she has more authority over the bride than the husband and can ruin her life.”

  Isaac, himself, had fallen in love with his wife before asking her to marry him. They’d gone to school together.

  “It was probably the first time the bride has ever left her village,” Isaac said. “She was frightened, and she has reason to be.”

  I felt guilty for looking at my shuka and being less proud to wear it now; this life, I realized, was not one I could have ever embraced completely. But as a nomad, myself, as a guest moving from culture to culture, could I pick the values I found beautiful and take them with me and simply leave the others behind?

  The Maasai burned a fire through the night near the entrance of Isaac’s boma, to guard against leopards prowling for goats. A leopard was chased off one night, and I stayed late at the fire the rest of the week, hoping she would show herself on return.

  Isaac had told me that the rainy season began each year when two stars came together, a pair of bright stars side by side in the night sky, part of the legacy I was determined to capture. I set up my camera to take a four-hour exposure and I imagined that the two stars would leave long, nearly parallel scratches on the film as they rose from the east. When I removed my hand from the lens, though, and let in the light, I understood how far I was from capturing the emotion of actually waiting for the two stars to meet and of what Kakuya might feel when walking in first rains that would bring new grass up from the stubble.

  “There’s a lion!” Isaac said one afternoon.

  I grabbed my knife, trembling, and we ran, the village emptying onto the savannah. Isaac had told me that four moran his age had been killed by lions when he was younger. But this lion was already far away.

  Light shone through tiny holes in the thin walls of Kakuya’s hut. I sat with him, our feet bare on the dirt. Through Isaac, I said to Kakuya, “Tell me one thing that is good in life.”

  “Cattle,” Kakuya said and he explained how the Maasai drank the blood and milk of their cattle, which I’d known even as a boy.

  “Tell me one thing that’s bad.”

  Kakuya spoke and Isaac listened. “The old man says ‘Education.’”

  “No, no, I meant a bad thing.”

  “I know,” Isaac said with a smile. “He said ‘Education.’ Let me ask him why.”

  Isaac leaned in as his father spoke.

  “My old man says that when the white man brought education he didn’t bring i
t as a gift. He brought it only to some people. The white man didn’t spread education equally. It wasn’t shared. Education was used by one tribe against another, as power.”

  Isaac walked me out of their territory.

  “Lamayan, will you be lost enough to be back here again?”

  “You’ll see me soon.”

  “You’re a part of us. You always have a place in my manyatta.”

  AN EQUAL FOE

  My camel looked smaller this morning. The light caught his eyelashes, exaggerating the movement of his eyes. His ears wiggled and he scampered across the corral and swung his head back toward me, as if to determine whether I were responsible for his quarantine from the other camels. It was early morning, the shadows of the acacia trees long across the savannah—central Kenya, north of Nanyuki, land of the Samburu tribe.

  My camel seemed far too odd and expressive to be made into a beast of burden, more like a companion in an animated film who might suddenly tell a joke. The few camels there were in central Kenya were raised for milk, meat, and hide. But I planned to use him for transport. I was headed to the remotest area on the map of East Africa, Turkana, a desert hundreds of kilometers north inhabited by tribesmen more isolated than the Maasai. Hominid fossils found in Turkana had earned it the name “cradle of humanity.”

  My camel’s hump was half bald, patchy with pubescence. Thick veins wound around his stomach like ant tunnels on a tree. He reminded me of the giraffes I’d chased, with knotty legs and too many joints. I was bringing him along to carry my water, as Lake Turkana, a soda lake, was undrinkable. Though I didn’t really need an excuse to travel with a camel. From the Samburu family who’d sold him to me I’d hidden my ignorance of all things related to camels. “Yes, this male looks strong. Enough. Fifteen thousand shillings is too much for a camel of his size. I’ll give 13,000 ($185). If you supply the trainers.”

  Training was a disaster, with a Samburu named Tanai teaching me to yell, “Tor! Tor!” while a half-Turkana man named Jonah whacked the camel’s ass with a cane. The camel repaid the violence by roaring, screaming, and spitting grassy green bile into my eyes. Our first short walks were duels of stubbornness and cruelty.