Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [120]
“So you built this?” I ask, indicating the house.
My question generates the strangest of looks, part bemused, part aghast. “No,” he says. “My wife built it.”
“Have you ever built a house yourself?”
“No. This is the work of women.”
Uh-oh. Something tells me we've been here before.
In fact, almost everything in this place is the work of women. The men put up the acacia fences, hone metal into sharp spears, and sit with penknives for hours, making sandals out of motorcycle tires; but all other jobs fall to their wives.
Lucy, Wilson's lovely better half, emerges from the low arched doorway, head bowed. She's petite, but with large, masculine upper arms from a lifetime working in construction. Her delicate looks are set off by the jewelry she uses to adorn herself: copious strings of beads, topping off a cotton dress that clings to her hips but freefalls elsewhere. In her hands she holds a dirty plastic keg, which she plans to carry to the water hole by strapping it to her head.
“Lucy is only one of my wifes,” Wilson informs me with some pride. “We Masai, we are allowed polygamy, so we have more than one wife.”
“And how many do you have?”
“Five.”
Five wives? In some countries, that would be considered greedy.
Not here. In a Masai village like this one, a man's wealth is calculated by the number of cattle he owns, and a woman is considered to be worth three cows. So, let me see … that's five wives … divided by … three plus four … carry the one … that means Wilson is worth about fifteen head of cattle. My God, the man's a bullionaire!
“And what-number wife is Lucy?”
“She is number one.” He smiles.
“Ah. So she gets all your favors?”
“Yes.” And he smiles again, only broader this time.
Meanwhile, Lucy isn't smiling at all, I notice.
Water for the village comes from a local spring fed by melting snows from Mount Kilimanjaro, an imposing purple silhouette hogging the western horizon across the border in Tanzania, and permanently obscured by sheaths of foaming cloud. The spring is reached by making a quarter-mile trek across a broad treeless plain—you know, the plain, the one where the lions, cheetahs, and hyenas live?
Moments like this make me realize how very little I know about Nature. It's going to sound daft, but most of the information I've gleaned over the years about wild animals comes from cartoons I used to watch as a kid, and I'm learning a little too late that most of that information was pretty basic, if not full-blown inaccurate.
So in the same way that cuddling a polar bear can lead to traumatic head and neck injuries—who knew?—I now find that:
Hyenas do not have a rollicking sense of humor that makes them endearing to other species. They're actually ruthless killers that enjoy disemboweling things. You would be a good example;
Whales are only hollow up to a point; you certainly can't live in one or build a fire on its tongue while you wait to be rescued;
Flamingos, turned upside down, cannot be used to play golf;
Elephants, rather than being gentle, playful, and harmless (and in some cases aerodynamic), in reality hate and fear human beings and will trample you to death at the first opportunity, flying down from the tops of trees in great numbers to attack you if you stray too close;
Individual ants are absolutely devoid of personality and humor;
Coyotes don't have the wit to send off for packages in the mail nor to assemble machinery when it arrives;
There is no stage during an emperor penguin's life cycle when it learns to sing and dance;
A snake's eyes do not revolve hypnotically just before it kills something;
A zebra is a whole new animal—it's not a poorly designed horse;
Barnyard pigs and geese don't discuss the farmer behind his back; and
Lions, while they may give off an air of intelligent, affable nobility in films, are not smart academically, nor are they