We reach the Masai Mara just before nightfall, at the end of a road that
degenerates from bad to just about non-existent. "We've taken a
shortcut," says Peter, who is at the wheel. It was uncomfortable but
afforded us some time in the Masai villages, among dark eyed women toting
bundles from straps that stretch from their foreheads and tall, dark warriors
wrapped in scarlet cloth, daggers gleaming from their belts. Cattle is their
life, and their cattle are sleek and gorgeous.
We spend the evening with our newfound traveling friends and break camp in the
early morning for the amber rolling grasslands of the Masai Mara. There, the
challenge is choosing in which direction to cast my gaze, because there is
vibrant, scintillating life on all sides of us. We stumble upon a cheetah
early on, already chewing deeply into the meaty hindquarters of a young impala.
She looks up only long enough to survey her observers, and returns to her meal
satisfied we are no threat, which we are not. We find elephants everywhere,
traveling in small herds with their young. They astonish us in their ability
to remain invisible despite their bulk: they are the color of shadow and as
silent as a memory.
Also silent are the giraffes. We discover three separate kinds of giraffe
during our stay in Kenya, and none has a voice. Though they seem ungainly
while still, they move with a grace and fluidity much greater than their form
suggests. I enjoy them as much as the zebras, which watch us shyly through
dark eyes, tails swishing.
The Masai Mara itself is a phenomenal backdrop for its exotic and amazing
denizens. The color of the grass is fluid as the sun slides from one horizon
overhead to the other, slipping through myriad shades of yellow, green, and
gold. The horizons are broad and open, and the sky overhead is immense. From
our vehicle we can see for kilometers and yet we only perceive a fraction of
the life that surrounds us. Still, it is there: velvet monkeys in the
treetops, gorgeous sapphire-colored birds flitting from the branches, gazelles
bounding across the hillsides.
Its most blatantly visible aspect is the wildebeest migration, which we are
lucky to be present for in August. They are too numerous to count, but form a
shaggy river the color of espresso, streaming over from a distant valley and
preparing to swim across the Mara. The sound of their hooves tramping, calves
with their mothers, no obvious leader and yet moving in a coordinated way that
resembles a river of flesh, forms the drumbeat of the plain. They have
traveled north from the Serengeti, and in a few months will return to where
they began, and no one knows why.
Just before lunch we drive out to a hillside on the other side of the Mara
river where we find a pride of lions devouring a wildebeest. The lion cubs are
feeding greedily, jaws still dripping with blood, licking their jowls, fuzzy
soft ears twitching. The female is splayed contentedly on a rock overlooking
the valley, her mate crouches in the high grass and watches us with a wary
expression of irritation that commands respect.
The image I carry back out of the Masai Mara is of the young, for we saw them
everywhere: elephant calves play wrestling each other, jostling with their
trunks, jackal cubs too busy playing the jumpy-bitey game we recognize from our
own Afri-mutts to prowl, lion cubs feeding, baboon young hitching a ride on
their mothers' backs or riding suspended from their mothers' warm bellies. We
observe zebra colts still fuzzy-eared, grazing with their herds and the fuzzy
round heads of cheetah cubs watching us from the safety of a far-off rock,
still warm with morning sun.
With no exceptions, the animals we see are healthy and well-fed, from gazelle
to oryx to cheetah to dik-dik to ostrich to hawk. Even the Masai, who we
encounter briefly, seem to be doing well overall, and their cattle was gorgeous
down to the very last head. We are not doing badly either, supping at the end
of the day back in camp. The long Masai Mara day has drawn to a close, and
tomorrow the animals of the African plain will go about their days as though we
had never existed - just the way it should be.
