Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna. National Kids Geographic

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СКАЧАТЬ at about seven o’clock, as the sun was going down, my family put all the calves into the family enclosure, and my job was to stand at the gate to keep them separate from their mothers.

      Then my mom would say, “Mongo. Let Mongo get out.” I would open the gate, and Mongo, who had heard his name, would come running out to his mother.

      The mother cows have four teats. When the little cow ran to its mother to drink milk, my mom would let it suck from two teats, and she would milk the other two teats. In other words, the calf got half, and we got half.

      When my mother finished milking that one, she would call, “Ntei Mongo!” I’d bring the first calf back to the pen, open the gate, and let the next one out. Letting the little cows get their milk takes about an hour.

      My mom used to let me drink my milk right there. I would sit by the cow and drink my milk out of the teat. The milk is warm and very sweet, much sweeter than milk in America. The sweetness comes from the leaves the cows eat. If we want sweeter milk, we take our cows to special places where they can eat leaves from a certain tree and a certain grass. Then the milk is especially delicious. It carries the scent of the tree.

      We also mix cow blood with the milk. This is especially tasty and good for you. Usually it takes three people to get the blood from a cow. Two people tie a rope around the cow’s neck and hold it so that the jugular vein pops up. The third person chooses a spot on the vein and hits it with a small, blunt arrow, making a little hole, a horizontal slit in the jugular vein. The blood comes out of that hole. You hold a gourd next to the cow’s neck, and the blood pours into the gourd. When you get enough, you loosen the rope and the blood stops flowing. You then put a little medicine on the wound to speed the healing. Having blood taken out isn’t bad for the cow. We don’t take any more blood than it can spare.

      When you have a bowl full of blood, you take a stick and swirl it around in the blood for five to ten minutes to remove all of the clots. Then you mix the blood with milk, more milk than blood. It’s delicious, simply delicious. If somebody’s sick and needs more blood in his body, we give him more blood than milk in the mixture. We believe that blood goes to blood in the body.

      WHEN THE CHORES ARE DONE, the kids get to play some more. We loved that time of day. It was dark, and there were so many night sounds—of birds, animals, insects. They all seemed to be singing to us. It was a great time to tell stories. We’d tell each other stories, and sometimes we would all gather to listen to a grown-up tell stories. My mom is a great storyteller. Often all the kids in the village would come and sit outside our house when it got dark, hoping she would tell a story. I would always sit close to my mom in case the story was scary. Sometimes she would tell a ghost story. The scariest was about the gambit, an animal that had four mouths. When she told gambit stories, all the kids would crowd around her. As the story got really scary, everyone would squeeze in closer. By the end of the story, all of us kids would be in one tight huddle around my mom.

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