Brendan Buzzard
tracks in the landscape, meaning that we do much of our work on foot, depositing the vehicle under a tree and wiping away the tracks to make it harder to find. There are not many people who would find it, yet here we are largely beyond the boundaries of administration, and a few decades ago this region was an elephant slaughter-ground, where heavily armed gangs of men supplied the international ivory trade. The weapons are still around, and poaching still goes on. Sometimes at night we hear the report of machine gun fire, and see tracers in the sky. Samuel calls the track we follow towards Kisima Hamsini the “elephant road.” It goes all the way across northern Kenya, he tells me, from the “Somalis to the Borana, the Samburu, even to Turkana.” Waving his hand from east to west, wiping the land in a half-circle, he mentions some of the ethnic pastoral groups in this part of Kenya. “But I cannot follow it the whole way,” he continues. “I would be killed.” He refers to the fact that he is Samburu, and that he would be unwelcome on the ranges or at the wells outside the borders of the lands occupied by his tribe. “But him,” he nods out the window into the bush, “he can walk how he wants.” When early engineers surveyed Africa to find the best routes for roads and rails, constructing their way into the interior of the continent in search of slaves, ivory, rubber, timber, riches and adventure, they often followed elephant trails. Elephants took the most level grade, they said. Not far from Kisima Hamsini another old track intercepts the one we are on, established in the days when Kenya was still a British colony. It is little used now; some of it washed out by intermittent rains, and in many places it has reverted to footpath. To the south, the track leads towards military training grounds. Artillery, tanks, infantry; both the Kenyan and British armies maneuver. The British have used it as a staging ground, a place to accustom young men and women to the desert before sending them on to Afghanistan. Sometimes they shell the hills, sparse islands that stand up out of the range, and the sound
46 Adventum
of the artillery rumbles across the landscape. During last year’s drought, it took the place of thunder. A year without rain, the drought hit this region hard. In an effort to keep their animals alive, herders moved further and further from their homes, looking for grass and water in the borderlands. Kisima Hamsini, like it always has, retained its water, drawing men and cattle and animals out of the bush, further from their homes, and the wells became necessary, as water will when there is hardly any left, as food does when people are hungry, and a group of Samburu and Borana warriors met. Fifteen young men were reported killed. We reach the wells in the late afternoon, the sun at a sideways angle, the shadows of the palms growing longer across the sand and green grass that grows, out of character in this land, with lushness. I do not know if there are actually fifty wells, but they dot a rocky depression, the geology forcing an underground stream near the surface, where people—from some long ago time—dug wells that have written themselves into the permanency of cultural and natural pattern. Squatting at one of them I dip my hand, cuplike, into the water. It is cool. I drink from my palm. It does not taste of salt. Searching the wells for sign of the elephant, I find a bullet casing half buried in sand. It is faded, almost weightless. Drawing it to my lips I blow and dispersing the dust I disperse time, wondering how long it has rested here at the edge of the well, over how many seasons the sand has gathered. The rangelands of northern Kenya generally have two rainy seasons a year, but last year none of them came. Is this casing from the drought, the fifteen men, or is it from further back in time? Could it have been an ivory poacher who, after slaying his prey, took an axe to the elephant’s giant skull, hacking the tusks away, for this is the only way they can be removed. The elephant, perhaps, would know more about this history. And, looking around, we see no sign of him. He hasn’t yet arrived. We climb to the top of a nearby outcrop of rock, giv-