Kilifi, Kenya

Although we had come to the Maasai Mara to see big game, in the end it was the human animal that held us in thrall. Fascinated by the unique culture of the Maasai, we eagerly jumped at a chance to visit a traditional village.

We went before breakfast, not long after dawn. This was because life in a Maasai village revolves around the cattle, which are herded back each night to an enclosure to protect them from predators. Unless we wanted to see an empty village, we had to get there before the cows left to go to pasture.

The village was a family grouping: two brothers, each of whom had two wives, their children and a grandmother. They lived in a collection of mud and thatch huts inside a boma, which is a tall circular enclosure made of thorny branches that, most of the time, keeps the lions away. Because this village had two elders, there were two entryways into the boma to be barricaded each night.

When we arrived, the family was just beginning to stir on this unseasonably cold morning. Their herd of about 25 cattle was still inside a thorny inner enclosure, a smaller version of the bigger outer boma. The people who emerged from their huts looked frail and chilled, their thin bare legs protruding from bright red robes like twin brown Popsicle sticks. We were warmly dressed and still cold, so my Popsicle analogy is apt in more ways than one.

We shook hands with the elders and gently placed our hands on the soft woolly heads of the children, who stepped forward and bowed in a rather touching and submissive gesture to receive this traditional greeting. We learned it was impolite to ask how many cattle or children there were, it being the Maasai equivalent of asking someone how much money he owns. That explained the answer to my innocent question about the number of children, which was answered with one word: "Many."

As we stood exchanging pleasantries with the two elders, who were in their thirties, a very unusual face peered out at us from one of the smoky doorways. It took a moment to recognize that this person was a woman, as her hair was closely shaven and her fissured face not obviously female. She had a wealth of coloured beads around her ankles, wrists and neck - maybe 15 different necklaces, and many more long chains of beads dangling from the tops of her ears, which leaned forward under the weight. She had large cut-out earlobes, grotesquely elongated in the Maasai fashion, one dangling noticeably lower than the other.

Her legs were sticks, and bony bare shoulders protruded from her tartan robe. This was Deeay (I didn't ask for the spelling, but it is pronounced dee-ay), the mother of the two elders, the honoured first wife of their father, the grandmother of many children, the family matriarch.

With her bald head and heavily laden, wiggily-waggly ears, she looked nothing like any grandmother I had ever seen, but having immersed myself in pictorial books about the Maasai, my initial shock at her appearance was succeeded rapidly by the feeling that she really was very beautiful.

We asked how old she was, but because the Maasai don't celebrate birthdays or keep track of years, nobody really knows their own age. Her sons nodded and said only that she was very, very old. Deeay herself said proudly that she was "fifty times three", which would make her 150. Our guides smiled at that and estimated that she might be eighty or ninety, but given that her oldest son was around 38, and Maasai women marry very young, we finally decided that she was most likely about 55.

Christopher had begun shivering and Deeay immediately adopted him in the way grannies all over the world have done, bringing him into her low-ceilinged mud house where a fire was burning without benefit of chimney, the smoke making its way out through the thatch of the roof. In a few minutes some of our group followed, stooping low to enter. Our eyes had difficulty adapting to the lack of light in the tiny, dark hut, illuminated only by the fire, and our noses rebelled against the overwhelming smell of smoke. Christopher was already warming himself in the red glow of the fire, a tiny goat at his feet.

The house, measuring perhaps four metres square, was divided into several compartments. There was the central area, with just enough room to move around the cooking fire, shelves for gourds of milk, a bench on one side and sleeping enclosures on two more, so that the beds served double duty as fireside seats. The bed platforms were made from mud, the same as the walls of the house, but covered with cowhide.

There was one bed for the women and children and another for the father, who spends his nights in various huts depending on which wife he favours. When the father comes for his conjugal visits, the children are sent away to the house of another woman. There was also a cubicle for baby calves, which are brought inside at night to protect them from cold and predators.

Shyly hanging back behind the half-wall enclosing the women's bed were two whispering, tittering girls, one of them a young mother of 16 with a six-week-old baby.

Deeay made a speech that caused our two translators to collapse in laughter, and it took some moments before they could collect themselves and explain. It turned out the grandmother had said she was very pleased to have us in her home, because it used to be that whenever she saw white people, she was so scared of them that she ran away to hide.

The grandmother was a wonderful surprise, a powerful woman both intelligent and inquisitive. My dad thought in another life she could have been a very successful politician. After exchanging ages and names, she asked my father what we Canadians eat. It's not an easy question to answer to someone whose main diet is milk, blood, and maize porridge, and who can't even imagine a supermarket, much less Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Dad did his best to describe a typical Canadian diet, and Deeay's answer to his description was very interesting.

"You are a very clever man, to be eating so many different foods," she said, through our translator. "We Maasai only eat one kind of food, and if that food is not available, we die. But you Canadians, because you eat so many different things, can always find enough to eat. You will never starve."

I was particularly interested in Adutari, the shy teenage mother. I had been learning rather troubling things about the treatment of young Maasai girls, who are not only put through a primitive, dangerous and excruciatingly painful ritual of genital mutilation when they are 12 or 13 years old, but who are shortly thereafter sold for marriage by their fathers, usually by the time they are 15. Three cows is the usual bride price in this community. It seemed to me that this transaction really was nothing more than an exchange of livestock, since the girls have no more to say about the matter than do the cattle.

The life of a Maasai woman is a tightly circumscribed one of few pleasures and even fewer choices. She is not expected to love her husband, nor he her. In fact the first wife is said to often encourage the husband to take additional wives, because they can share the work and relieve the first wife of the burden of his night time visits.

I asked this very pretty young girl, who was a second wife and half the age of her husband, whether she had known him before their marriage. She responded with a big smile that yes, she had known him and so she was very lucky. I smiled and nodded in reply, but did not share this girl's feelings about her good fortune. By the time she's my age, if she makes it that far, she'll have had a dozen children, her body will be wrung dry and she'll look just like the old grandmother. The Maasai were arousing in me, as they have in many others, feelings of fascination and horror in equal measure.

We talked for the better part of an hour, the fire gradually dimming until it became hard to see. Our eyes and noses were stinging from the acrid smoke, and my mother politely but decisively refused Deeay's offer that we stay for tea.

Finally we left the hut, blinking in the bright sunlight, our bodies resisting leaving the warmth but our lungs joyfully embracing the clean air. Deeay and my mother posed for pictures, the two matriarchs making a very interesting contrast indeed. Christopher began shivering again, and Deeay gathered him up in her outer robe, something I wasn't sure he would appreciate. But he's been embraced by so many toothless Indonesian crones with blood-red Betel nut spit in their mouths, that he accepted Deeay's kind gesture gratefully and walked across the boma, cheerfully chattering in her arms.

The cattle were now out of their inner enclosure and milling around the huts, adding great piles of dung to the courtyard. The men hadn't yet released the herd because there was an elephant outside and it was unsafe to leave. We milled about with the herd as well, looking for the other members of our party. Michael, Jonathan and Sarah appeared, happily cradling a baby goat. One of the guides joked that if Michael wanted to keep the goat, he might be able to trade Sarah for it.

"Oh no," said Mike protectively, putting his arm around the blonde seven year old, "I like my cousin."

Sarah's mother, unaware that her daughter was being haggled over, was still deep in discussion with the lady of another household. Linda was having a fascinating conversation in which she had been asked whether she had ever kissed her husband. When she answered that she had, and often, the Maasai wife had collapsed in laughter the way a 10-year-old schoolgirl would, when presented with a truly gross and disgusting thought. A Maasai woman, she explained, would never think of kissing her husband - a boyfriend, perhaps, but never a husband.

As we left, we asked our guides about a gift to thank the family for their hospitality. After some discussion, the men agreed that an appropriate gift would be some cloth for the grandmother, which was something a dutiful son-in-law might present as a sign of respect. Later that day they drove us to a simple market, where we purchased a brand new warm blanket for putting around the old lady's thin shoulders, a matching skirt, as well as three additional lengths of bright cloth. When the shopkeeper heard for whom the cloth was intended, she removed a beaded bracelet from her own arm and smilingly gave it to me as a present.

We returned briefly to the boma in the late afternoon. The men and the cattle were gone, and we found the five women returning from a long walk, to fetch water, perhaps. They were accompanied by a flock of young children, mostly with crusty eyes and drippy noses, barefoot, dressed in filthy torn rags. One toddler was virtually naked, his bare bottom showing underneath a pathetic t-shirt that reached only half way down his belly. We were still chilly in long pants and jackets and could barely stand to see these children wearing almost nothing at all.

We presented the cloth to Deeay, which she accepted in a dignified fashion. As we drove away, leaving the cheerfully waving little group behind us in a cloud of dust, I held on to the hope that the robes no longer needed by the old woman might at least get handed down to others who could use them -- although the likelihood of them ever covering up those shivering, naked children was, I knew, very small.

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