"Into each generation a slayer is born, one girl in all the world with the strength and skill to fight the demons..."
So I tell them the story of Buffy, of vampires and fighting and heartbreak and wishes gone terribly awry. And I am pleased,
no, amazed, that as we sit around the fire, as I speak and Kesuma translates, women and boys and girls and men lean forward
to listen. Their faces light up. They gasp and laugh and shake their heads. My story too meanders a bit toward the end, and
must be confusing--
Buffy,
as I've pointed out, can be a bitch of a thing to recap--but it's clear that the tale makes sense to them. And I end it as
the Maasai ended their stories, with a moral.
"Be careful what you wish for. We all have to live in the worlds we make for ourselves."
I do not sleep well that night, not because I'm not tired, or because I'm moping or worrying or obsessing--surprisingly, I'm
not doing any of these things. I do spend some time fantasizing about bringing Eric here, but it's a contented thought. And
I'm pleased that I don't even want to entertain the notion of showing all of this to D; nothing could interest him less. No,
the reason I'm not sleeping is that hurricane-force winds are buffeting my little tent. The noise of flapping nylon is unceasing,
like sails in a gale. I fear the thing is going to come apart. For hours and hours this goes on, until finally Elly and Obed
emerge from their own tent and come to tend to mine. I see their flashlights coming toward me, and then they're shouting at
me to stay inside, as the edges of the tent have come loose. They manage to tamp everything back down, ensuring that I'm not
going to blow over the side of the mountain. At last, at around dawn, the wind abates and I'm able to sleep for an hour or
two.
Kesuma greets me at the door of my tent as I stumble out. "We have a big, big day. Obed has your breakfast."
After I ingest a prepackaged cake and peanut butter on bread, pineapple juice, and a slice of mango, Kesuma takes me into
the cattle pen so I can watch the men bleed a cow.
This is, at last, exactly the reason I've come to Tanzania in the first place. "I want to go to a Maasai village and drink
cow blood!" I told Eric when I was trying to explain to him why I had to rip myself away from him again, and so soon. It wasn't
about my unhappiness or his lack; it was experience I sought, exoticism. Just a touch of the utterly foreign, that's all.
He wasn't convinced, but it made a good sound bite.
And I must say that as an experience to go halfway around the world for, cow bleeding doesn't disappoint. We crowd into the
pen, the animals jostling to one side of the enclosure to get some distance between us and them. The men discuss which steer
to choose; they want a male (for some reason they always bleed males) who is young and healthy enough to withstand the procedure
and heal quickly. Once they decide on one, a midsized red creature, two of the men get a rope around its neck and drag it
forward. They hold its head steady, and someone hooks an arm over its neck, around its horns, in a sort of headlock, pulling
the rope tight so that the jugular vein swells. More warriors lean up hard against the steer's sides to keep it from dancing
away. Kesuma has with him a bow-and-arrow set; the bow is only about two feet long, with a crude stick for an arrow, tied
to the wood of the bow by a short length of twine. He leans down to get a good angle and then, at very close range, shoots
the popping vein, pricking it. The steer jerks a bit, of course--there is now a gout of blood pouring out of its neck, after
all--but mostly seems fairly resigned, like this is a bad trip to the dentist. The blood collects in a tall gourd, which holds,
I'd imagine, a liter or more. The men fill it all the way to the top, and then Kesuma reaches down and grabs a big gob of
mud and dung from the ground and pats it on the wound. They let the steer go and it trots off back into the herd, a little
pissy perhaps but, apparently, not much the worse for wear.
One of the men picks up a longish stick, which has been shoved into the pen's thorny fence for safekeeping, and uses it to
vigorously stir the blood in the gourd, for several minutes. When he lifts the stick back out again, it's covered in thready
red goop, like meaty cotton candy, I suppose whatever solids there are in the blood. He hands it to a small boy, who begins
eating the stuff off the stick with relish.
"Sometimes kids don't like the blood, so we give them this to get them used to it. It's more like meat."
"Uh. Okay." Well, so much for universality and
Buffy.
I guess this right here is what you call an unbridgeable cultural gap. Because that is just irretrievably nasty.
Kesuma's wife brings tin cups out for all of us adults, and each is filled about halfway. We drink. It's blood, all right.
Salty and oddly familiar, like biting the inside of your cheek or having a tooth pulled.
Afterward Kesuma's wife brings us more of the cinnamony tea in a pot. I watch a tiny boy, perhaps four or five, take one of
the cups we've just been drinking blood out of and studiously clean it out by squatting in the middle of the corral, scooping
in dirt and dung, and tossing it around in the cup before emptying it out and getting some tea. Ah well. I guess this is the
sort of thing you have to get used to. I drink my tea.
Then we pack up some stuff and start down the mountain, me and Kesuma, Elly and Obed, Leyan and a couple more young men from
the
boma
. We're going to what Kesuma is calling the
orpul,
but I have no very clear understanding of what that is. I know only that they're going to kill me a goat once we get there.
The day is already hot, and the climb down into the valley is rocky and steep. I keep slipping and nearly falling, while Kesuma
and the other Maasai go tripping down the mountainside ahead of me like a bunch of brightly robed mountain goats. I grab onto
spiky trees, try to keep from breathing too hard, and just manage to keep up, sort of. The hike down takes maybe half an hour,
and winds up in a shaded ravine--a creek bed, actually, though only a trickle of water runs through now, at the end of the
dry season. Another young guy from the village arrived a little before us, and with him the goat we'll be eating for dinner.
It's a white goat, serene, seemingly not at all discomfited to be here in this rocky, narrow place, surrounded by men with
very large knives strapped to their waists.
For a while the goat just munches contentedly on a stunted tree growing out of a crevice in the rock as some of the young
men build a fire and Obed and Elly unpack the considerable supplies they've toted down the mountain to make the
mzungu
woman reasonably comfortable--Western-style food in Tupperware containers, a sleeping bag, cooking utensils, and bottles upon
bottles of water, one of which Obed forces on me now. I've yet to see an African drink anything at all other than soda or
beer. The sun is strong, even though broken into shafts by the spindly trees and sifted through by the breeze blowing down
through the ravine; it's been a long walk down the mountain. I lap up the water greedily.
By the time the fire is built, on a little ledge above and across the tiny riverbed from the flattened-out spot, surrounded
by thorny branches that evidently will serve as our sleeping area, one of the boys has gathered a large bunch of leafy twigs
from downstream. They lay them out near the goat, who immediately turns to chew some of these fresher leaves. So it's not
pondering death, at least it would not seem so to human eyes, when two of the Maasai grab it, one man taking the two forelegs
in one hand, the other the two back, and toss it to the ground. It immediately begins to squeal, of course, being thrown about
like that, but the men have it firmly in their grasp and hold it down without too much trouble, their scarlet and purple robes
flung over their shoulders, out of their way, revealing lanky muscles. Kesuma squats and grabs the goat's head, holding its
mouth closed and its nostrils shut.
The goat doesn't stop thrashing, not for several minutes. Neither does it quit vocally protesting, attempting to scream and
grunt through Kesuma's muffling hand. The three Maasai chat among themselves, laughing, as the animal struggles.
The goats here are happy, I have to believe, fat and shiny-coated with the run of the countryside and no fear of their human
keepers. But that doesn't mean that death is not painful and ugly. The creature wants life, desperately, won't let go of it
for a long time. I wonder why the men laugh. I think it's because no matter how often you go through this ritual, how inured
you become to killing animals with your own hands, if you are a decent human being you still hang on to that slight discomfort,
that bit of shame over causing such distress. I had not thought I'd be so affected.
"Why can't you, you know, hit it over the head with a rock or something? Slit its throat?"
"The heart must stop beating before we open it up, so that we can collect the blood. The blood's the most important part."
Gradually, the animal ceases to grunt or jerk its head; as it does, the giggling stops, and the men grow watchful and considering.
They squat over the animal, occasionally putting a hand out to touch the hide, softly, even tenderly, shaking the goat's shoulder
gently as if trying to wake it from sleep. They are trying to feel something in the way the flesh moves under their hands,
I guess, some indication of total release. Finally, after some muttered exchanges, after a moment more of quiet, Kesuma releases
the goat's head. Its body is now limp; its neck seems boneless. They lift it onto the bier of green branches, rest it on its
back with its head folded, like a swan tucking its head under its wing, and take their long knives from the scabbards at their
waists.
One of the young men punches the dead goat hard in the stomach several times, ending each blow with a sort of brief massage
with his knuckles. Kesuma looks up to explain, perhaps realizing that to my eyes, this pummeling looks a little harsh. "We
want all the blood to be in the stomach." Punching a dead goat to make all its blood go into its stomach doesn't seem like
a particularly scientifically sound process, but what the hell, these guys have slaughtered a lot more goats than I have.
Then the three men, taking turns, begin to skin the animal.
I've never skinned a whole mammal. But I've boned out ducks and turkeys, and this begins to look a little like that. Kesuma
makes a slit from the point just above the breastbone to the genitals--boy's parts, it was a he--which he cuts off. Then on
either side of the slit, using their knives and their hands, the men start working the skin away from the fat and muscle.
There is very little blood; a trickle or two from a nicked vein. From neck to tail, the skin comes away, down and down toward
the joints of the legs. They cut a line through the hide on the inside of each leg, right to the hooves. These hooves they
cut off, like Josh would work off the hooves of pigs. Kesuma hands them to one of the other boys, who takes them up to the
fire to roast. The rest of the men continue to work the skin off the four haunches, until the hide is connected to the animal's
body only along its backbone and at the nape of the neck. But the creature's head is still on and it still looks very much
like a goat--and also a little like an illustration from a particularly gruesome Germanic retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood,"
with a small, mutilated body lying splayed on the tender pink cloak that was once its skin.
They take the leg joints off. Then one of the men breaks into the body cavity by pressing the tip of his long knife at the
breastbone and banging down on the hilt with the palm of his hand until the bone cracks. They lift out the intestines, pale
and still contained in their thin blue sac. They take out the liver, hand it around for each of them to take a bite of. Kesuma
cuts off a piece for me to eat, which I do. It tastes much as I would expect, still warm, with a meltingly tender texture,
like bloody cheesecake. There's something about the taste that is a little different from liver I've had in the past, but
I can't quite put my finger on it. The rest of the liver he hands up to the guy by the fire.
Next he hands me a piece of kidney, which is... fine. Slightly urinous, but fine. Then some sort of greenish grayish glandular
something; I'll just go out on a limb and say maybe pancreas? Also raw. And rubbery. But I swallow all bits offered without
comment. Now they have a tin cup and are using it to scoop up cupfuls of the blood that has pooled in the body's cavity. We
all wash down our bites of organ with it. I realize what I'd tasted about the liver that was different. Goat blood tastes
different from beef blood, or my own. It's almost... well, it's...
"It's sweet!"
Kesuma nods as I return the cup. He takes a big swig and passes it on. "That's right. Sweet! Now, show me your hand." The
other young men are continuing to break down the goat into parts, haunches and racks of ribs to be roasted or stored to take
up the mountain to their families the next day. But Kesuma takes a break to do a little something for me. First he cuts a
strip of hide from the edge of the flayed-open belly of the goat, perhaps five inches long and half an inch wide. He holds
it up against the back of my hand, the slimy interior side against my skin, snowy white hair on the top side. He seems to
make a measurement with his fingers, then takes the strip away and, working on a flat rock, makes two vertical slits in it;
at one end, less than an inch long, and at the other, a bit longer. He beckons me to give him my left hand again, and when
I do he slips the larger hole around it, works the hide down to the wrist, and slips my middle finger through the small slit.
"This is a tradition at the
orpul.
The young warriors come here once they are circumcised, to learn about herbs and barks to use for medicine, and to kill a
cow. Sick men will come other times when they need to get well. And this"--he pats my hand, which now has a band of goatskin
around it, stretching up in a sort of upside-down Y shape around my middle finger--"this is like... like a good-luck bracelet.
If you get one of these when you're at the
orpul
and then you don't take it off until you come back, or until it falls off, you'll have good luck."