Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [121]
As we stride boldly across the plain, Wilson assures me, hand on heart, that I'm in no danger from lions, not during the daytime, if we all stick together. But I'm not so sure.
A hundred or so feet out, it's all spookily quiet and still, and I'm already feeling a little exposed, even though we're quite a sizable group by now. Not only have Wilson's other wives, numbers two through four, come along for the jaunt, each with a plastic beer keg strapped to her head, but we also have the crew running around filming us, plus someone else: a shady background figure sporting a red beret and carrying a loaded rifle. Not a soldier, even though he dresses like one; more likely a game warden. The guy never speaks, never allows himself to be caught on-camera. Prefers instead to loiter a few yards away from the group, staring vacantly off in another direction, distant but always with us, his presence underscoring my point for the umpteenth time, that if this weren't a TV show and I was actually stranded out here in the wilds on my own, I'd be a goner.
“Oh, look!” Wilson cries, bending down to scoop something off the ground. Enthusiastically, he sticks a small brown pellet under my nose.
“What is it?”
“Donkey dung!”
Oh my God. “Get it away from me! Get it away!”
“This is from a donkey.”
“Yes, great. Now, put it down!”
He tosses it away, not quite understanding what the problem is.
Turns out, this is his main area of expertise. There's nothing Wilson doesn't know about feces. And he has an infinite variety to choose from. In fact, what you don't realize when you see movies, and what documentaries never tell you about Kenya, I guess because it's not considered interesting, is that the whole place is ankle deep in shit. It's everywhere. The beautiful, sprawling savanna, the bushland, the lush wooded valleys, wherever you choose to set foot, it seems to be coated in a fine veneer of excrement from roaming animals. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that you can't walk five feet out here without stepping in something that squelches.
“Look at this big slab of poo here,” I say, deciding to test his expert knowledge with a couple of dinner-plate-sized pats. “Which animal did that?”
“This is buffalo dung,” Wilson declares with the lofty air of a man who's trodden in something similar on many memorable occasions. “It looks like cow dung but it's more solid.” And he crouches to show me.
“No, don't pick it up!”
Three feet farther on, I come across a whole cluster of cue-ball-sized droppings covered in flies.
“What's this one?”
“This one?” The poofessor peers closely at it.
“And don't pick it up!”
“This is donkey dung.”
Again? Strange, because I've seen not a single donkey since we arrived. Giraffes, yes, buffalo, yes, even an elephant or two that wandered close to the perimeter fence of our hotel yesterday, but no donkeys. Yet their feces are like wall-to-wall carpeting.
Bored already, I walk on in search of new thrills. “What else is there?”
“Zebra?”
Oooh.
“Where's zebra dung?” Rushing to his side, I'm disappointed to find a bunch of brown golfballs, same as before. “That looks like donkey dung again.”
“Yes, but it's bigger.”
“And what's this one?” At my feet is a zigzag of chalky-looking hemorrhoids.
“This is hyena dung.”
“Why is it white?”
Wilson grabs a handful and crumbles it into the wind.
“It's white because the hyena eats a lot of ashes.”
And a lot of people, he omits to say.
To my relief, the watering hole is finally in view. Sadly, in my haste to reach it, I plant my foot squarely in a heap of grassy turds the size of grapefruit.
YEEEEUUUWW!
Behind me, his five wives start giggling.
“This is elephant dung,” Wilson explains with great exuberance.
“Really? Elepha—stop, don't pick it up!!”
Too late. “Elephant dung we use for making fire.”
They do. Like the Tanna islanders, the Masai, being un-corrupted by corporate greed,