Rainy Season on the Cattle Stock Route
From the side of the track, a Samburu youth waved me down. I stopped the vehicle. He was gorgeously dressed for market day: all feathers, beads, disks of aluminium, with ochre on his head and bare shoulders. He wore in his beaded belt a stabbing sword in a leather scabbard. In his left hand he carried a herding stick and metal-headed knobkerrie. In his right was a long spear with a teardrop blade at the point, and this he hid in the branches of a wait-a-bit thorn tree for safekeeping until his return. He loped towards me, spat in his palm and shook my hand. He asked for a lift and I told him to get in. I was on a supply run to town.
In the back I carried empty butane tanks, crates of empty beer and soda bottles.
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