Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 44

from the other moran , I felt, not for the first time in my friendship
with Toronkei, a spasm of jealousy. I sat in the hut drinking milk and
greeting the procession of young men who came in to pay their
respects to him, troubled by a sense of inadequacy. As I watched the
warriors sitting hand in hand on the pallet, and the young woman
looking tenderly at her husband, I was struck by a thought so clear
and resonant that it was as if a bell had been rung beside my ear. Had
I, as an embryo, been given a choice between my life and his - know-
ing that, whichever I accepted, I would adapt to it and make myself
comfortable within it - I would have taken his.
Despite six rich years of adventure in the tropics, mine now looked
like a small and shuffling life. I thought of what awaited me when, in
a few months' time, I returned home. I had been planning to finish my
topic, ind new work, rekindle old friendships, perhaps put down a
deposit on a house. After two bouts of cerebral malaria, as my
expenses mounted and my savings trickled away, as I tired of lice,
mosquitoes, foul water and corrugated roads, it had seemed appeal-
ing. But now I thought of the conversations confined to the three Rs:
renovation, recipes and resorts. I thought of railings and hoardings. I
thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shout-
ing at you as soon as you stray from the footpath. I succumbed, not
for the first time in my life, to an attack of the futilities.
In 1753, Benjamin Franklin, writing to the English botanist Peter
Collinson, made the following complaint:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our lan-
guage and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations
and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him
ever to return, and that this is not natural to them merely as Indians,
but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex
have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while
among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all
imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English,
yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and
the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first
good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence
there is no reclaiming them. 1