FINDING COMMON GROUND Brendan Buzzard
I
t has not rained in three months, and the dry riverbed in Kenya’s northern desert is a layer of memory. Crusted ridges of sand are all that remain from a forgotten surge of water, and I feel their contours under my feet as I squat in the shade of a palm, its fronds rustling in the mid-morning breeze. Footprints of various sizes and shapes trail back and forth across the sand, hinting at the life in this deceptively quiet thorn-scrub rangeland: an oryx and her calf crossed from one side to the other sometime ago; two male lions, perhaps brothers, walked side by side down the center of the riverbed early one morning; a flock of sandgrouse, one evening just before dark, gathered near a now-dried pool of water; and last night a lone elephant lingered here for a few moments before continuing on his journey west. Samuel and I linger too, and we contemplate these memories. Squatting next to me in the shade, Samuel rests his weight on his rifle, its butt buried in the sand, and I watch as he presses his palm, fingers open, into one of the elephant’s footprints. “Do you think he knows we are following
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him?” Samuel asks in quiet Kiswahili. I nod my head and shift my weight. “Maybe.” “I think he knows,” Samuel continues, withdrawing his hand from the sand, leaving a mark that looks small compared to the large circular track that engulfs it. Samuel and I have been following this elephant for a week, and all we have seen of him are footprints. Travelling forty to fifty kilometers a day he doesn’t seem to stop, an unusual behavior in a landscape with little surface water, and sometimes it has felt like we are following a shadow. His route, covering a few hundred kilometers and leading from east to west, makes sense when viewed through the lenses of the desert—he seems to know where all the water points are, leaving one and heading exactly in the direction of another, arching his way from oasis to oasis across this northern region of Kenya. This path makes sense to Samuel. A member of the Samburu community, he comes from a culture of livestock keeping, an intimate relationship between human and animal that makes these rangelands habit-