The Maasai and the Cattle of the Sky

Long ago, says the story, there were no cattle on the earth at all.

All the cattle lived in the sky with Enkai, who made the world. They grazed up there among the clouds, fat and slow and content, and nobody down below had ever seen one.

Then Enkai looked down and saw the Maasai, standing on the wide grass with nothing to look after.

So Enkai lowered a long root down from the sky, all the way to the earth, and sent the cattle walking carefully down it, one after another, until every last one of them stood on the grass.

And Enkai said: these are yours now. Look after them.

The Maasai have been doing exactly that ever since, on the great grasslands of Kenya and Tanzania, where the acacia trees are flat on top like tables and the sky goes on and on.

You would know them if you saw them. They wear shukas, cloths of deep red and blue and checked patterns, wrapped and knotted at the shoulder. They wear beadwork made in bright circles. And at celebrations the young men do the adumu, a dance where they stand very straight and jump, and jump, and jump, higher each time, without ever bending forward.

Their homes sit in a ring called an enkang, with a fence of thorny branches around the outside and the cattle safe in the middle.

Every evening the herds come home. The dust rises gold in the low sun, the bells knock softly, and the cattle walk in through the gap in the thorns, exactly as they have done since the day they came down the root.

Then the gap is closed, and everyone sleeps.

Goodnight. Sleep well.