The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  On day five of training, when the camel, Jonah, and I returned from a trip to the bore hole, I said, “Tanai, tomorrow, I’m taking the camel to the river. Alone.”

  “Jonah needs to go behind you,” Tanai said in Swahili.

  “No. I’m doing it alone. I’m going alone.”

  Tanai thought I didn’t understand. He drew a diagram in the sand and pointed. “You. Camel. Jonah.”

  I shook my head. “Tomorrow. I go alone. I’m walking alone. One man. Me.” I erased Jonah from the sand and slapped my chest. “Mtu moja. Mimi.”

  “Lamayan, it’s not possible,” Tanai said, his eye twitching. I realized then that what I’d seen as a stage in the camel’s training—towing him from the front and whipping him from the back as he fought like a bull—was to Tanai the proper method of travel. “The camel is a clever animal,” he said. “If no one goes behind him he knows you can’t control him. You have to take another man for the journey.”

  “How much time to train him to go with one man?” I said.

  Tanai scratched his chin. “Mwezi moja.” One month.

  Defeated, I retired to the house.

  The Samburu family lived in an isolated wood cabin, its inner walls plastered with peeling newspaper and pages from old calendars. They had a pickup, a long-drop outhouse toilet, wheat fields, a garden, and cattle grazing in a pasture to the south. The father, who had four boys, wore a beaded bracelet, a link to his nomadic roots and a life more like Kakuya’s. His wife had high cheekbones and wore shawls of purple, red, and blue—festive and royal but still of the bush. In their cut, low hanging earlobes they wore no earrings.

  “I’m going alone,” I said at dawn to the camel trainers.

  “Camel, you and I are going to the river!”

  I got the bridle on him, whacked his ass with a stick, yanked the rope, yelled, “Brrrh, brrrh!” The camels lips parted and he sprayed my face with half-digested grass from the pit of his stomach. Then he looked away, satisfied I’d gotten my punishment, and followed me out of the corral.

  My purple Bacardi shirt was soon soaked with sweat as I fought my camel over every millimeter of scorching ground. Flies traveled back and forth between the camel and me, as if some horrid ecosystem were forming between us. I dashed to his rump to whack him with the cane, then ran to the front to pull him, and in the process I walked twice as far, while the stinking grassy green bile baked on my face.

  “Brrrh, brrrh, you stupid monster! We go we go we go!”

  In dozens of countries, men raced on camels. My camel wedged himself into the thorny branches of an acacia bush and wouldn’t move. When I yanked the braided sisal rope, he swung his long neck toward me, releasing the rope’s tension, sending me backwards into the thorns. He swung his jaw and bared ugly yellow teeth in silent mockery. Then roared.

  Exhausted and cramping, I dragged the camel to the river, his stubbornness exceeded only by mine. I tied him up, stripped and threw myself into the water.

  Dusk caught us before we got back to the farm. The camel had made a strategy of parking himself in acacia and then staring at me, his pupils shaped like antique keyholes. I thrust my neck out, said, “Brrrh, brrrh!” The camel screamed and skipped forward and rammed me into thorns. I smashed the cane over his back, and what I’d seen as violence just days before was now both ordinary and essential.

  “You want to sleep here?” I yelled. “Is that what you want?”

  Darkness at the equator came like a falling curtain, with the sun dropping straight over the horizon. Stars appeared like little warnings. I stumbled into bushes, dodged silhouetted trees.

  Something charged! A hiss through the grass. Rushing feet. I lunged, clung to the camel’s neck. A current shot through my spine. Animals sliced by on both sides. Screeching. Hyenas tearing though the trees, their laughter seething in the darkness.

  The camel was frozen, everything silent. I lifted my chin and tuned my ears to the distance, my jaw tensed as if focusing my hearing. I rotated my head, hoping if the hyenas charged again, it would be to the broadside of the camel, with his flesh between us. Three hyenas cried off to the side, far off. And I exhaled. And courage became cowardice. I was trembling. My legs wanted me running but I was safer with the camel whose instincts were finally aligned with mine. We hurried together toward the house, I watching the camel to see if he were picking up sounds beyond my range.

  A light. A flashlight. It was Tanai.

  After leaving Isaac, I’d returned to Nairobi and scoured the bookshops on Moi Avenue for the names of photographers who’d worked in Kenya, because photography could help turn my journey into a life. After two weeks of searching, I found British photographer Duncan Willetts, a survivor of the Bang Bang Club, a group of photojournalists who’d made a name for themselves in war zones. His house was in Westlands, the yard lush, blooming with bougainvillea. Willetts greeted me outside and said, “Can you believe these bloody Maasai are grazing their cattle in my grass?”

  Failed rains had brought herders to the gardens of Nairobi, a town that a century earlier had been a Maasai watering hole.

  Willetts praised me for my first attempts to get difficult images. He appreciated the idea of traveling with a camel and then directed me toward Nyahururu where I could find one.

  At dawn, I grabbed the wood saddle Tanai and I had carved with machetes. I slung it onto the camel’s back and tied sisal ropes around his belly before he pitched it. I strapped my cooking pot and backpack to the saddle and wedged my machete in, the handle within easy reach. The family stuffed gifts into the saddle pouches: honey, tea, and ugali powder, demonstrating why the word for “stranger” in Swahili, mgeni, was the same as “guest.” The Samburu mother poured me cup after cup of camel milk tea, as if she knew I was embarking on a period of great wanting. I gave her boys my Pink Floyd tapes and said good-bye.

  The camel and I turned and began our journey. I’d named him Lapa, “moon” in KiSamburu. The coolness of the early morning burned away in the African sun, and green belts of savannah gave way to brown. Circular elephant tracks, lined as delicately as fingerprints, were pressed into the dirt two hours from the farm. I moved through a grove of trees and tied Lapa to a branch, got my camera, and crept toward a clearing through a cluster of twisted, broken tree trunks. Six elephants, I saw. Seven. The babies seemed as small and harmless as rabbits. For two idyllic seconds, I watched elephants moving together. One trumpeted. Charged. Ears flaring. I snapped a photograph and ducked between branches. The elephants stormed through the trees, flattening an acacia, another, the ground thundering with the weight of animals and crashing wood. One small elephant rammed a tree trunk that stopped him with a crack. I stumbled and tripped, just meters from being crushed, and I ran until the elephants were no longer behind me, and I continued to run.

  I circled back downwind from the herd. Lapa was traumatized, jerking his head. “Shh, shh.” He shuddered when I touched him. I took the rope, and he spun around as though he’d lost his bearings. Then he began pulling in the direction of the farm. I turned him north, toward Turkana, and ran between his head and ass, hitting and tugging. But he was deadweight. After an hour of frustration, we headed back to the house.

  I set out the next morning with a neighboring Samburu teenager who walked behind Lapa with the cane. Then we came upon elephant tracks. The boy stopped and fidgeted with his shuka, clearly concerned by the prospect of marauding giants. He said, “This journey is too long for me. I forgot. I have work on the farm.” He handed me the cane and hurried off. He’d agreed to a trip of five hundred kilometers and hadn’t made five.

  I stood in silence, downcast, wondering how I would ever get moving. My mind drifted to trips I’d made to see the parents of Erez Shtark after he died in the helicopter crash. Weekend after weekend I’d made the long drive from the army base, alone, to bring to Erez’s parents small doses of the happiness and energy they’d lost and to show them that their son was not forgotten. Ofer called my trips an obsession. On the driv
es home from the Shtarks’ house I played Final Cut on the stereo, again and again, every time I drove, to create a ceremony of melancholy out of a longing to feel something real.

  From the trees in front of me, wearing a beaded headband and carrying a spear with a goatskin sheath, came a young Samburu warrior walking south. He was relaxed and confident. I opened a packet of biscuits, took one, and put the rest in his hand. He looked down at the biscuits, then up at me, confused, for the give and take of the West was not the way of the bush. I felt ashamed that the biscuits were almost a bribe.

  I pointed north. In Swahili, I said, “I need to go there. I walked with a boy. He left, afraid. The camel needs two people. Me. You. Do we go?”

  Not sure whether he’d understood, I handed him the cane and said, “Tuende.” Let’s go. I clucked my tongue. Lapa began to walk. Within one minute of materializing from nowhere, the Samburu turned in behind the camel and followed.

  We reached the river and swung north and slept that night in his grandmother’s boma. In the morning, we drank tea with milk and sugar. I checked the compass, aimed us at a tree on a distant ridge. And we walked. I had one direction: north. Saying Lake Turkana was my destination was akin to saying I was walking to Syria. My map was so crude, it had an illustrated giraffe in the middle of it. I didn’t care if I reached Turkana by way of Ethiopia or if I missed the lake entirely. Walking, for now, was to be my life. Destination was an excuse. And my compass was a tool for continuing to be lost, for staying away from roads, for ensuring I didn’t end up in Nanyuki, Maralal, or some place actually on a map.

  I shortened the rope and pulled Lapa with my arms. I lengthened it and towed the beast over my shoulder to spread the toil of dragging him through the muscles of my back. Flies clustered on my eyelashes. Lapa screamed at me, spit, pulled me backwards, rammed my chest, kicked at the Samburu. That evening, the soft light of dusk returned texture to the savannah, details the midday sun washed out. The grass glowed in the same way hair on my arms caught the light, as though overwhelmed by the sun. I pitched the tent and lit a fire and waited for moonrise to summon shapes of animals from the darkness. The night was cold, and the warrior and I slept in the tent under my sleeping bag. And I tried to imagine his thoughts. Perhaps when your home was the bush, any journey crossing yours became your own. I woke to add wood to the fire, to chase off an animal that yelped and skipped away. With moonlight bright on the savannah, I set up my camera to photograph a hint of the magic of being out in the dark beside leaping flames. For a moment, I let myself forget that the fire burned to keep predators away, burned to keep us alive. My shortness of breath made clear that the urge to be as wild as the savannah ran counter to instinct.

  We woke with sunrise and continued. Without breakfast. In early morning, it was easy to navigate by the sun. We followed a ribbon of trees that was like a hand holding back the heat, then crossed an expanse of loose volcanic rock that made Lapa snort and flail. Below us in the distance was a herd of a hundred elephants—the energy of the world in motion—an image of such magnificence, I doubted for a moment what I saw.

  Some mornings I rekindled the wood of the night’s fire, filled the kettle, and boiled tea. When I made ugali and set the pot between us, the Samburu and I talked little and he ate far more than I. Often he offered to help with Lapa or with the food, but I told him I could manage. Next to Isaac, he was barely a warrior. But he was at home on the plains, capable of handling whatever we met. And I was here to push myself beyond the point where I could be saved from my mistakes.

  I drove us at a pace of roughly thirty kilometers a day. We stopped in bomas of the Samburu who fed us sukuma wiki, plentiful, simple food meant to stretch the week. Villagers gave us groundnuts and replenished our stock of ugali powder and filled my jerricans with water and Samburu beer—sweet like champagne but not strong. There was little distinction in the villages between what was theirs and what was not. And how could anything repay them for giving up their beds to strangers or slaughtering a goat their children had raised? Money, save for occasional trips to markets to buy salt or cloth, was not used in daily life. Before setting out with Lapa, I’d considered heading back to a town to get more cash; I had just $50. But I’d thought, If villagers have no place to drink but from a river, then I will drink from a river. If they can live virtually without money, then so can I.

  One day, a man told us about a bandit attack on a road two days east. Another Samburu said, “It’s far to Turkana. Take care; they are bad people.”

  Lapa was falling into rhythm, fighting less each day, walking without stopping, though still under the shadow of the cane.

  Slicing across the savannah with the promise of water was a band of green, a forest climbing up through a crack. We hurried downhill, scaring gazelles. I tied Lapa near a patch of grass, stripped bare and jumped in tandem with the warrior—into a river filled with Samburu who were swimming and scrubbing clothes. Women fled up the river-banks and covered their breasts at the sight of me. Small boys giggled, swam close, and I grabbed them under the arms and flung them into the air; and the river swallowed their laughter. I sank into the cool water to rest my swollen, blistered feet, to scrub my scrapes and insect bites, to wash the camel’s sourness from my exhausted body. Light shone on the water with a brightness that sparkled through my eyelids. Deep in the river, feeling that I’d slipped inside the earth, I drank of the source that kept the village alive.

  Two dozen laughing Samburu led us up a path, and I sensed that the warrior was ready to head home. While Lapa munched on the cactus fence surrounding the boma, we divided up the food given to us in our time together. I pulled out my Walkman, tapes, and enough batteries to last for months, and I put everything in his hands. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re a good friend.” And he was gone before nightfall.

  I left the village the next morning, joined by a curious and talkative warrior with the Christian name of Stanley. And I stopped counting the days. I tracked our progress by the angle at which Samburu pointed to distant villages. I felt tiny in the landscape, which stretched on as though Israel were a myth and there were nothing in the world but the plains. Samburu walked on distant hills, red dots, as small to me as I was to them, all of us moving through a land we could not fill. The sun was brutal, the ground dry and shade-less. The grasses of past rains were yellow, the earth waiting for its crust to be broken.

  My body was changing, the fight with Lapa thickening my arms. Blisters formed and healed almost without my noticing. I quenched my thirst with the Samburu beer villagers poured into my jerricans like the inexhaustible blessing of the tribe. I couldn’t imagine how I’d spent four years in the army living someone else’s life. As I traveled further and further from what I knew, I wanted my old beliefs to slip away and the ropes connecting me to my past to snap for good. Borders were artificial; geographical or cultural, they were excuses. I thought of Isaac, who’d said of his village, “This is my home.” His comment was to me as much a statement that he had chosen the culture that fit him as it was an indication that I had yet to find my own.

  By week three, the camel was regressing.

  Lapa’s body twitched, unsettling a coat of flies. He opened his mouth and sprayed me with rotting grass. I yanked the rope. He screamed, his eyes bulging, jaw swinging. Violence rose within me like the emotions of someone I didn’t know. I broke the cane across the camel’s ass, cracked tree limbs on his knees, gritted my teeth and yelled until my chest hurt. Adherence to mission was a principle driven into me by the army.

  “You shouldn’t beat him,” Stanley said. “It just makes him resist.”

  Stanley wasn’t yet immune to the charm of Lapa’s eyelashes.

  “Maybe he’s afraid of heights. Wasiwasi,” Stanley said

  “What good is a camel in the mountains if he’s afraid of hills? Turkana is full of mountains!”

  We climbed for hours as the plains lengthened behind us. A stream ran just off parallel from the route we’d made. The midday sun wa
s as vicious as the flies dive-bombing my face. Lapa stopped and wouldn’t move.

  “You brown dragon, I’ll feed you to hyenas!”

  Lapa was grinning, staring at me. We weren’t going to reach Turkana together. He seemed to see a scam in what I wanted to be. The battle was between my desire to continue in an arbitrary direction and his to go nowhere. My camel felt like the baggage of all I’d come from, a confused legacy abusive to the idea of finding a new way.

  Just as quickly as he’d stopped, Lapa began to move. I towed the rope over my shoulder, plowed through the gravel, dragged him on as if I were towing a tank over a pass. The trail we followed cut across a hill toward the outpost of Amaya.

  The camel slipped, screamed. The rope pulled free from my hand as he fell, flipped and tumbled downhill. A bush stopped him ten meters below. He was bawling, on his back, legs thrashing the air. He looked so small flailing on the side of the hill.

  I felt instant relief that the climax had come. Then guilt.

  Stanley and I scurried down to him. We yanked the saddle ropes and flipped him while trying not to get kicked in the teeth. I slapped Lapa once and he scampered back to the path, intact, save for patches of hair clawed out by thorns. I emptied the saddle pouches into my backpack. Stanley took the saddle on his shoulders. We tried to continue but Lapa wouldn’t move.

  I left the camel with Stanley and set out alone for Amaya, feeling again and again that I’d forgotten something, as after I’d handed in the rifle that rode for years on my back. Then, as though a new season had already been reached, a rainstorm swept in, which the elders in Amaya gave me credit for bringing. The English-speaking chief greeted me with the enthusiasm he might have shown for a returning son. We hiked back to Stanley with an entourage and a camel expert armed with a rope. I kept my distance from Lapa, not wanting to see his face and thinking of a line from a Sinead O’Connor song about divorce: I’ll meet you later in somebody’s office.