The Game Goes On

A field on the outskirts of Nanyuki: at one corner a garbage dump smolders behind a row of shops lining the highway; the sun pounds down through a stiff southwesterly breeze; and smoke flattens toward a hut not far away. The hut is built of old tin cans and branches, whose dead leaves flap in the acrid wind. Inside the hut, seated on cattle skulls, three men and a woman are drinking tea from chipped enamel mugs. A small fire sputters. Outside lies what looks like a bundle of sticks wrapped in a tattered, faded red blanket. But something stirs for a moment, black skin through the holes. It's not a bundle of sticks. It's old Nyngao the Hyena,-the Eater of Meat, and he is dying.

"Na Kwisha," says Bill Winter. "He's finished. The poor old sod doesn't even know we're here. When I first met him, he was a big, strong fellow with bracelets above his biceps and a wrist knife on his arm. His head was plastered with blue mud interwoven with ostrich feathers and the hair of his ancestors. He was full-grown before he ever saw a white man. Must be more than 100 years old. Now look at him." Winter shakes his head. "Na Kwisha."

The woman says she is Nyngao's granddaughter. We give her 25 shillings for milk and tobacco. Maybe it will ease the old man's departure. At the sound of our voices, he wakes. Eyes crusted with dried pus, he stares up and finally recognizes Winter. The rheumy eyes focus sharply with delight, and he rises from the blanket. He offers his hand, which feels like a fistful of twigs wrapped in grease paper.

"Habari yako, rafiki?" "How are you, friend?"

"Mzuri sana," the old man replies. "Very well, indeed."

As we drive away, Winter shakes his head again. "It's all finished, Bwana. In a few years it'll all be gone. The old ways, the warriors, perhaps even the game. That dying Turkana is just one symbol of it. When he was young, he told me once, he marched clear across the Suguta Desert, drinking nothing but the sweat he could scrape from his armpits and his crotch. Wearing nothing but his togalike shuka and that great, hairy blue periwig. Imagine it! In those days they raided and stole cattle from the neighboring tribes, they killed their enemies. Now he's dying in filth behind a garbage dump."

Kirinyaga rises ahead of us like a broken fang, blue and white in the afternoon sun. Mount Kenya , the map makers call it, but to the people of this country it is Kirinyaga, the home of their god.

I had come to Kenya to assess the state of the game. Since the government announced a ban on sport hunting last May, ostensibly to preserve what was left of Kenya 's once countless wildlife, animal lovers the world over had believed that finally something was being done to conserve the great game herds of East Africa 's loveliest country. Editorialists from Tokyo to New York praised President Jomo Kenyatta for a courageous decision that would spare the unique Pleistocene wildlife of Kenya for generations to come.

They cheered too soon.

Even as Kenya 's 106 licensed professional hunters folded their safari tents, poachers went on a rampage. The nation's 250 curio shops quickly overflowed with the horns, hides, claws, fangs, tusks, feathers and eggs of virtually every species of animal and bird available. With the hunters and their clients no longer ranging the game lands—and in the process reporting poachers to Kenya 's understaffed Game Department—the serious killing had just begun.