Wild life: Could I ever revive the Pinguaan Springs?

Il Pinguaan Springs

When I first saw the Pinguaan Springs they were small, fetid bogs set about with papyrus, the haunt of mercury-coloured frogs and dragonflies. I wondered why they were regarded as so important that you could find them on any half-decent map of Kenya. Without water, the farm we were building could never stir into life. In those days I did not know what to do. For two years we collected water in jerricans and loaded them on to donkeys to be trekked to the tent where we lived. Baboons defecated in the spring pools. We all came down with Giardia. On many of our adventures we were alone and I was foolhardy. Our neighbours regularly had to save our lives when bandits came, charging over the hill in response to radio alarms. These cattlemen were harder than I could ever be. I told one how the bend in a road where a man had been killed in an ambush spooked me so much I would accelerate. He replied, ‘I always stop — sometimes I have a pee.’ Occasionally they murmured helpful observations. ‘A good cow should be pretty, just like a woman,’ one told me in the yards. ‘If she’s ugly, send her to the butcher.’ They helped, but they didn’t volunteer much, and each time I called on them I could see they saw me as a city boy, a fool with a head full of ridiculous ideas. Failure seemed inevitable, but I was determined to survive by learning from my mistakes. I remembered the movie Jean de Florette

, in which the old peasant Soubeyran — scheming to hide the potential of his neighbour’s land — tells his apathetic friends that the life-giving water source has dried up.