Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 41

He edged forward. This time his pride was piqued. The chameleon
sat quietly on my hand, rotating its eyes. It wound its tail around my
little finger.
'You can touch it if you want. It won't hurt you.'
Clutching his spear so tightly that his knuckles shone, Toronkei
advanced towards me. His mouth hung open. Trembling with self-control,
he stretched out a hand and pushed the tip of his finger forward until it
touched the chameleon's flank. It reared up, opened its pink mouth and
hissed. He leapt backwards, stumbled, almost fell. Now it was my turn
to struggle to control myself. I turned away and returned the chameleon
to the bush, desperately trying not to laugh. I pretended to watch it settle
in for a moment while I rearranged my face, then turned back. Toronkei
stared at me with what I chose to believe was new respect. It is more
likely to have been a conviction that I had gone mad.
Setting off at dawn, we had already run and walked twenty miles,
describing a wide loop across Kajiado District, in the northern part of
the Maasai's territory. At midday we had stopped at his uncle's house
for milk, and spent two hours sitting in the shade, talking and swat-
ting away flies. Now, with fifteen miles to go, we were travelling home
to Toronkei's manyatta . We stood on a low escarpment, looking
across the plains, spotted with shrubs and thundercloud acacias, that
rose, through sage to grey to blue, towards an invisible Kilimanjaro,
shrouded, as it so often was, by cloud or the mere thickness of the sky.
Wavering through the heat haze beneath us were herds of
multi-coloured cattle, dun eland, impala.
As usual, Toronkei had outpaced me, but every so often he had
stopped and pretended to scan the land to allow me to catch up; he
was more protective of my feelings than I was of his. We had no par-
ticular objective, other than visiting his uncle; running over the
savannahs was an end in itself. He and the other moran would push
themselves to accomplish remarkable feats, such as driving their cattle
140 miles in three days, without eating, drinking or sleeping. Occa-
sionally, though they were now severely punished if caught by the
Kenyan police, they would raid cattle from the Kikuyu who lived in
the surrounding lands, sometimes escaping under a storm of bullets.
Talking to Toronkei and the other warriors, it had struck me that
escaping under a storm of bullets was as much the purpose of the