Word: dung
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plains Leifer hunted with his camera. His safari guide stalked leopards and cheetahs by carefully sifting through footprints and dung. But the hunt did not always end when the quarry was sighted. "The animals had to be in the right setting and have the right light," says Leifer. "Otherwise they'd be unphotographable." During his forays, Leifer and his assistant James Keyser were able to track down only one leopard that could be photographed. "My leopard," Leifer now proudly calls it. On the other hand, serendipity led him to his lions. One morning around 5:30, while on a bumpy...
...sleep, hyenas come to giggle and whoop. Peering from the tent flap, one catches in the shadows their sidelong criminal slouch. Their eyes shine like evil flashlight bulbs, a disembodied horror-movie yellow, phosphorescent, glowing like the children of the damned. In the morning, one finds their droppings: white dung, like a photographic negative. Hyenas not only eat the meat of animals but grind up and digest the bones. The hyenas' dung is white with the calcium of powdered bones...
...East Africa for generations have been infatuated with the Masai. Yet certain details of their lives, like the flies that sometimes cake their lips and eyelids, can be disgusting. The Masai dwell in the world's most magnificent spaces. Yet to stoop at midday to enter one of their dung-walled huts to share a cup of tea is to be plunged immediately into an impenetrable, claustrophobic gloom, choked with smoke. A laser beam of sunlight fires through the darkness from a window the size of a Kenya five-shilling piece. It takes three minutes for the eyes to adjust...
Davis was at his prayers next evening at dusk when the witch doctor came to speak to the visitor. The witch doctor, Ole Loompirai, sat in a dark, dung- walled hut and drank beer with the visitor and explained the work that he did. The laibon, or witch doctor, spoke in a low, murmurous voice in Maa, sucking frequently on an oversize bottle of Tusker, a faintly smoky Kenya beer brought up in the Land Cruiser from Narok. Moses impassively translated...
Moses, like all other serious students of African bushcraft, is a reader of droppings, an analyst and commentator on dung. As he and Olentwala whistled the cattle along, he remarked now and then on the evidence that lay in the forest paths and meadows. Here a Dik-dik passed in the early morning. There a waterbuck had paused. Everywhere in East Africa such expertise is encountered...