mwalimu

Before Paul had any animals collared last year he had to take a visiting friend to the Nairobi zoo to see a lion. Many wageni, tourists, come on African safaris hoping to get a glimpse of a lion living in the wild. They replace the bars of the cage with the steel of the vehicle - I’ve yet to see anyone willing to replace all barriers with fate. Lazy carnivores make this search difficult and national park regulations about driving after dark, you can’t, curb those chances even more. Keeping that in mind, a week ago we arrived back at camp with Paul's advisor, Scott and the whole Creel family. His daughters, 12 and 13 years of age, were on their first African safari. Their first night in camp, second day in the country, we took them on a game drive and tracked one of the lions. We found Mwanzo, the lioness, saw a hunt, and saw her and another lioness kill a zebra. Not only was it their first lion hunt and kill – it was my first lion hunt and kill; it was the Kenyan’s we had with us in the car first lion hunt and kill. What’s next? We had a lot to live up to with the remaining portion of this trip. Somehow we found a way to put icing on that cake by collaring another male lion a few days later. He hasn’t been officially named, but there has been some talk about his name being something like, 7 People and a Dog, because those were the contents of the truck when we found him. With a little man handling the little Jack Russell, Diesel, managed to keep relatively quiet throughout the whole procedure. I envisioned placing him on the lion to get a good picture, but
I decided that that might be pushing the limits of various ethical and security arguments.

Hyena hunting went a little bit slower. They managed to steal the bait once and evade the whole situation altogether most of the rest of the time. In fact, instead of us catching a hyena with our professional gear, one of our camp dogs, Monster, managed to get herself snared by a homemade version lingering somewhere along the river. She came up to me in the morning dragging a long piece of old metal. It extended into a loop around her neck pulled pretty tightly though she seemed to have forgotten about it already. The fact that she was dragging it meant that she was able to snap it loose from whatever tree it was tied to so it must have been an old trap. What its intended target was is a mystery.

Before closing the Creel chapter of this year, we took them to visit a couple of the schools. The children greeted us with practiced song and dance routines and the story was the same at both schools; they had qualified for the countrywide competition, but couldn’t afford to go. We introduced ourselves and left them with some school supplies collected from visitors of the research center. Then Scott’s daughters showed a video that they had made of students from their school. One of the teachers said that she was pretty sure that that was the first time 90 percent of the children had ever seen a computer screen. The video showed little clips of various school subjects and then a bunch of the students were asked what they liked to do for fun. Being a school in Montana, I think about 95 percent of them said that they liked to ski. The girls thought this through and realized that children in a remote, arid part of Kenya probably didn’t know what skiing was, let alone snow. So they included some snapshots of snowy mountaintops and people skiing. The children pushed and shoved for a better view of the screen and another one of the teachers turned to me and asked, “So what subject in school is skiing?”