Wild Life

The first time I almost died I was six months old. We had just moved to Kenya and were living in a small green house far out in the middle of the grasslands in Amboseli National Park, close enough to the border with Tanzania to see Mount Kilimanjaro. My mother put me down to sleep in my crib with a candle burning on the windowsill since I screamed if the room was completely dark. As the story goes, when she came back a little while later to see if I had fallen asleep, she found me no longer alone in my room but suddenly in the company of a very large, very angry black mamba.

My mother froze. There wasn't anything she could do. She couldn't run into the room without scaring the snake into biting me, so she stood in the doorway, hoping the snake would decide that the flailing baby was too disruptive and leave on its own, which it eventually did, but only after I made an especially loud "coo!" and attempted to grab it by the neck.

I don't remember the incident with the snake, of course, nor do I remember the second time I almost died, a few months later when my parents sat me down to play in the grass in front of our house only to see me immediately swarmed by siafus, or safari ants.

"So what did you do?" I asked, years later when I first heard the story. Siafu bites are very painful, and our Maasai housekeeper Masaku used to tell me how siafus could kill and eat small animals and had jaws so strong that the Maasai sometimes used them for stitches when they had an injury. I couldn't imagine a baby surviving being swarmed by them. Mom looked uncomfortable.

"Well, we got them off you, of course," she said. "Dad brushed most of them off and then we got the rest of them to let go of you by dunking you in the rain barrel behind the house."

"You dunked me in a rain barrel?" I yelled.

"Of course we did! I mean, it was no big deal," Mom said. "Obviously you were fine. It was a lot less scary than the first time you met a baboon."

That one I do remember. I must have been three or so and was again playing outside the house in Kenya. I'd walked a short way down the dusty road that led away from our house and toward the nearby Maasai village, following elephant tracks. I wasn't paying attention to anything around me, just kicking one of the round balls of elephant poop that the other village children and I often used as soccer balls. I squatted down in the road to pick it up when I heard a rustle in the grass behind me and turned around to find a gigantic monkey standing over me.

Even as a small child I knew it was a baboon. The monkeys Mom and Dad studied were much smaller and had black spots on their faces; they were called vervet monkeys, though I'd always called them "fever monkeys" since it was easier to say. The vervets rarely came close to our house, but the baboons were often nearby; Masaku told me these nyani were garbage animals that came into his village to look for food. It was the job of the little boys in the village to chase them away from the cows and goats since, though the nyani were monkeys, they were skilled hunters and often killed baby goats and ate them. I knew this particular baboon was a male because his snout was wider and heavier than the females' and Dad said the male baboons were about the size of a Saint Bernard, whatever that was.

I dropped my ball of elephant poop and stared up at the baboon, which didn't seem all that scary. I smiled at it. Mom always told me that animals aren't dangerous by nature; they're dangerous if you startle them, and if you don't then you're just another animal to them. Then the baboon grunted and took a few steps closer to me.

"Keena," I heard Dad say quietly from the front steps of the house where he'd been watching me play. "I need you to do something for me."

"Okay!" I said brightly, still looking at the baboon.

"I need you to walk backward to me. Do you think you can do that?"

"Yes, Daddy!" I said. I waved to the baboon and began walking backward through the soft sand in the road. As I retreated, the baboon immediately sat down and snatched up my soccer ball, happily picking through it for partially digested seeds and fruits. Fresh elephant poop is one of their favorite foods.

It didn't occur to me that the baboon was any danger to me. Dad seemed relieved when he finally picked me up, but didn't raise his voice or shout in any way that made me think he'd been worried for my safety. Baboons were familiar, and just as much a part of my daily life as the Maasai warriors who trooped down the road singing songs in their bright red shukas or the herds of elephants, buffalo, and zebras that roamed through the grassland around our house, which Dad drove me out to see in our Land Rover if I'd been good.

We'd been living in Kenya for almost two years by then, all in the little green house in the grasslands under the mountain. I knew that Kenya was in Africa, and Africa was a long way away from another place called America, where Mom and Dad said we had another home that I didn't remember. "Home" to me meant soft wind and waving grass, the smell of zebras and the whooping of hyenas as the sun set over the plains. Home was our housekeeper Masaku letting me tenderize meat with an empty wine bottle before dinner and shaking out my shoes before putting them on in case scorpions or spiders were inside. Home was spending my days wrenching the lug nuts on and off the wheels of our truck and going on game drives with Dad to look at buffalo and watch quietly as they moved through the grasslands like ships on the sea.

America was where I was born, or so they told me. When Mom learned she was pregnant with me, she had driven into the capital city of Nairobi to one of the few clinics that had an ultrasound machine. Shaking his head sadly, the ultrasound tech informed my mother that her fetus was "too deformed" and had "a very, very small head. Too small for a human baby." Mom unsuccessfully tried to stay calm and made arrangements to fly to California to have her child, since my parents' academic affiliation with Stanford University gave her access to the hospital there.

The second I was born I was whisked into the neonatal intensive care unit and a team of doctors descended on me, led by a neonatologist named Dr. Sunshine. When I was finally brought back to my mother, Dr. Sunshine said cheerily, "Her head is fine. Just please promise me: no more backroom ultrasounds."

I also knew I had grandparents in America, though I never saw them. They often wrote us letters that my mother read to me, and sometimes sent me presents, including a stuffed owl I named Bundi, which Masaku had told me was the Swahili word for owl. Everyone gave me stuffed monkeys, since that's what my parents studied, but I liked the owl best because it was different. Masaku said that witches turned themselves into owls at night and that it was very bad luck if an owl landed on your house because it meant that someone who lived there would die soon. He refused to touch Bundi, even though it was just a toy.

My grandparents were furious when my parents brought me back to Kenya only a couple of months after I was born. When my mom had become pregnant with me, my parents had only recently relocated to Kenya from the Karisoke Research Center in Ruhengeri, Rwanda, where they had been working with the famed gorilla researcher Dian Fossey in a camp that was very basic and hardly a place to raise a baby. My grandparents were worried that our home in Kenya might be just as unsuitable.

It's important to specify that these concerns came almost entirely from my dad's parents, the ones who lived in suburban Chicago. His family was (as he later put it) "painfully conventional," and the idea of moving halfway around the world to study monkeys was an unbelievable shock to the country club community he had grown up in.

"I just don't know what to tell them," Dad's mother drawled in a Southern accent she brought with her from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

"There aren't any monkeys in the US," Dad would say. "If I'm going to study them in their natural habitat I kind of have to go where that is."

"Are you sure you don't want to be an architect?" his father would ask, and Dad, third in a line of Robert Seyfarths and the first nonarchitect, would simply nod.

"This is what I'm going to do," he said. Eventually, they agreed it was fine as long as he didn't take his children with him, whenever they came along.

Mom's mother, my grandmother Sally, was never bothered by Mom and Dad's work. Mom was raised in the Foreign Service, in a family that spent time in Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Nicaragua all before my mom was a teenager, and before her father was killed in a plane crash on an aid mission in the Philippines. No one in her family was bothered in the least by having few modern amenities or not speaking to family members for months or sometimes years at a time because the mail was so slow. When she met Dad in college and decided to follow him into his PhD program in animal behavior so she could go "ask interesting questions about interesting animals in interesting places," as she used to tell me, her mother and siblings barely batted an eye.

"It really was very wet and cold up there in Dian's camp," Mom told me. "We lived in these tiny wooden huts that were heated with wood stoves and were always full of smoke. It was so wet that nothing ever dried and it was very hard to keep our notes and recording equipment from being chewed up by rats. There were just so many rats…" she trailed off. "At night they would sometimes run across my bed and I'd have to hit them with books."

It sounded to me like the entire time at Dian's camp was difficult. First, studying the gorillas was challenging. In order to observe their natural behavior, the scientists had to do everything they could to make sure the gorillas ignored them, including standing quietly as young silverbacks charged them in displays of aggression, and letting themselves be shoved down a hill covered in stinging nettles if the babies wanted to play with them. Back at the camp, Dian liked to slap Dad on the back and call him Bobby, even after he repeatedly told her that he preferred to be called Robert.

"Not to worry, Bobby," Dian would say, throwing her arm around Dad's shoulders. "Auntie Dian will always be there for you."

As Rwanda became more and more dangerous to work in politically, Dian began to show signs of strain. Her paranoia became increasingly odd, and when she eventually confided in my parents that she thought her phones were being tapped, they decided that the time had come to move on to a more stable and comfortable situation.

Kenya, my parents patiently explained to my grandparents, was much safer. Vervet monkeys are small and nonthreatening, and we could live in a real house, far away from the smoking shacks of Dian's mountain camp. But it was no use. To my grandparents, everywhere in Africa was the same and the whole continent was dangerous. One of the first sentences I learned to say on my own was, "I am fine, I am safe," spoken confidently through a phone from a hotel in Nairobi to my grandparents' house in the suburbs of Chicago.

And I really was fine, at least to the extent that I understood what that meant as a toddler. Every day, my parents would leave in the Land Rover to spend the day watching and observing the vervet monkeys, while I would hang out with Masaku as he did chores around the house or took walks to the village to talk with the other mzee, old men like himself. Masaku smelled like wood smoke, and his hands were soft and strong as he held on to mine as we walked.

Masaku taught me the names of all the animals on the plains in front of our house and that each animal has a different kind of track and its own kind of poop. As we walked up and down the road between the village and our house, he would point out crisscrossing lines of animal prints and wait for me to tell him which animals they came from; these small ones were gazelles', these hoofprints were zebras', and this poop was from a hyena—the easiest of all to identify because hyena poop is always white from the bones they eat. How many lobes on the paw of a simba (lion)? I held up three fingers. And do you see claws when you see the track of a duma (cheetah)? I nodded my head yes. Cheetahs' claws don't retract into their paws like lions' and leopards' do.

Sometimes one of Masaku's three wives would help babysit me, though as a child I always had a hard time telling them apart since they never really spoke to me. None of them ever said anything above a whisper. When Dad asked him why, Masaku replied, "One of them cursed the other two so they can only speak in a whisper and the one who did the cursing also whispers in order to hide her identity."

"And you don't mind?" Dad asked.

"Oh no," he replied. "The house is so quiet." And every afternoon, Mom and Dad would come back from work and take me on game drives out through the grasslands of Amboseli National Park to look for animals. The buffalo were my favorite since they moved around in such large groups that they would completely surround the car and make me feel like I was part of the herd. We often saw elephants, zebras, and herds of hundreds and hundreds of wildebeests grazing under the mountain and bleating like cows. My parents and I would sit out there for hours, quietly watching the animals go about their business, while Dad would periodically reach out the window of the Land Rover to empty my plastic bin into the grass. Potty training had to go on, even when there were wildebeests to watch.

Every morning as the sun came up and every evening as it set behind Mount Kilimanjaro, I sat on the front step of the tiny green house and watched the animals move across the land. Birds flew home to roost, elephants rumbled to their babies, and zebras moved out of the trees into the grass where they could see any approaching predators more easily. When it was time for dinner, we ate at a small foldout table in the kitchen, lit by hurricane lanterns and open to the night. Sometimes Mom and Dad told me the story about how an elephant sneezed on their windshield, and sometimes we'd talk about the vervet monkeys and how they were different from the gorillas they studied in Rwanda. When I went to sleep under my mosquito net with my stuffed owl, the thick smells from outside surrounded me and reminded me the animals were still there, just going to sleep as I was, and we'd see each other again in the morning when the sun came up.

Despite the peace of being alone with the wind and the animals, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disquiet creep slowly into my life. Why did Mom and Dad keep telling me my home was not my home? And what were these machines in my books called elevators, escalators, and microwaves? These things were as foreign to me as this place called America, and even though I was told I'd seen them before, I wasn't interested in going back. There was so much to see and do and learn about in Kenya, and Mom and Dad said there were no animals in the US. Why would I want a home that didn't include them? America could stay safely where it was, on the other side of the world; I had all the home I needed already.

We left Kenya for