Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton Read Free Page A

cows, and I was lining the rocks up and calling them in, the way my father and brothers did with the real cows. There was a knife lying on the ground. I picked it up to play with, and all of a sudden—blood! It didn’t bother me—there was no pain, just lots of blood. Then someone saw me. “Hey, look at Lekuton’sson!” My mother came running over. She started crying, and then of course I started crying, too. The wound healed—my mother treated it with some herbs—but I still have the scar, under my right eye.
    Cows are our way of life. They give us milk and blood and sometimes meat to eat and hides to wear. They’re our wealth. We don’t have money; we have cows. The more cows somebody has, the wealthier he is. My mother has lived her whole life in a hut made of sticks and cow dung, and you could put everything she owns on the seat of a chair. She lives entirely on the cow. For her, there’s something wrong with someone who doesn’t have cows. It’s just not civilized.
    With cows comes respect. The more cows a man has, the more respect he gets. A man with a big herd will be listened to by the others in the village. But if that man loses his cows because he doesn’t care for them properly, or is too lazy to take them to better pastures, no one will pay attention. The respect goes with the cows; a poor man does not have a voice. The reason? We know someone with a lot of cows has worked hard, taken risks, brought his cows to where there is grass and water.
    We have three criteria for judging a cow. Number one is the color. The best color is white with a lot ofblack spots, like an Appaloosa horse. To us, that is the most beautiful cow. Number two is the horn. We like a male cow to have big, even horns. And number three is the personality of a cow. A good cow is always at the front of the herd. If the cow is always late, if he’s always behind all the other cows, he’s not considered a good cow. We do not care about how heavy a cow is. Never. Just the beauty of its color, the size of its horns, and how active it is.
    We name our cows. Each cow has a name, like a person, almost. My brother knows the names of all his cows, all of them. At night when he walks home after taking care of his cows, he will stand on raised ground and look down at them.
    The cows all belong to different cattle families, and those in the same family look alike. My brother knows how many cows are in each family, and he’ll name the families as they pass: Mongo, Muge, Narok, and so on. And he’ll know if each family is complete. The Mongo family is all there, the Muge family is all there, the Narok family is all there, and so on. That’s how we count. In a few minutes he’ll know who is there and who is missing. And that’s hundreds of cows.
    Our cows do not die of old age. We either sell a cow or butcher it. The only exception is a blessed cow. Rightnow, one of our cows—it is my brother’s cow, a bull—is blessed. It doesn’t look like much. It’s gray with a single black spot right in the middle of its back. One horn is normal; the other is crooked. But it’s special.
    Twice it happened that when my brother took his cows out in the morning that bull got in front of the rest of the cows and refused to move. He refused to move until my brother took his cows in a different direction from the rest of the village herd. The first time it happened, my brother didn’t understand what the cow was up to, but he is smart, he knows that sometimes cows can have a sense of danger, an instinct. So he went the direction the bull wanted to go. And both of those days raiders—men with guns—attacked the rest of the village herd. But my brother’s cows were spared.
    That kind of bull is a great blessing. You never can sell one like that. When it gets too old, perhaps 20 or so years old, you can slaughter it in a special ritual in your boma , the corral that surrounds the cows at night. Only your family is allowed to eat the meat from that