Wild life | 4 October 2018

Laikipia, Kenya

  The Turkana cowhands are on Facebook and they spend a lot of time on their cell phones, but they are also superb trackers and one of them, called Ekuwom, can divine the future by ‘reading’ the entrails of a butchered animal like the Etruscans. After the confusion of a heavy thunderstorm before dusk one evening we lost a flock of sheep; we searched all night and rescued dozens. In my experience with lion, leopard, jackal and hyena, a sheep left outside the boma overnight has a 50–50 chance of living until morning. At dawn, beneath low cloud, we found 12 carcasses scattered white and red across the grasslands. The hyenas had only half eaten a single one, leaving the rest with skulls crushed and balls and guts ripped away from the arse ends. Suddenly the clouds lifted and the morning light slanted on to the dewy grass. I saw every detail with ultra-clarity, even single juniper trees cresting hilltops many miles away. The week before, I had dismissed a shepherd for drunkenness. As we loaded the dead sheep into my vehicle, the men said that the dismissed shepherd had taken revenge against me by bewitching the flocks — and that was why they had been lost. Despite all the sorcery contaminating the dead animals, the men deemed the mutton edible, and back home we cut up the meat for everybody to have a share. As they butchered one carcass, the men spread out the entrails on beds of bright orange croton leaves to study them. These stringy-framed men with their Egyptian pharaoh faces bellowed in wonder while pointing to a line of black dots on the intestines, on either side of a large blue central vein, which curled in a semi-circle along a ridge of white fat. ‘Here is the gate to our farm,’ Ekuwom said, pointing for me.