Safaris

The shelves of my father’s study-cum-Tottenham Hotspur shrine, stacked with leatherbound match day programs and soccer players’ autobiographies, belie his life’s true obsession: gorillas. The clues are there, though. A small bronze statue of a silverback makes a heavy bookend. A wooden walking stick, its handle carved into the shape of an ape, is propped in the corner. Remove them — and our hazy memories of tracking black, fluffy balls of muscle through lush African forest could be chalked up to a fever dream. But we really did it. After a decade of idle talk, Dad and I devised our mission: we’d research gorillas in Rwanda and realize his life goal of tracking them in Uganda.

To grasp the untamed vastness of Samburu County, it’s necessary to get high. Above the thickets of acacia trees, thorny branches like barbed wire against the cloudless sky. Out of the Rift Valley’s rubbly trenches, dotted with bleached animal skulls and groves of candelabra-like doum palms clustered around some-time watering holes. To the peak of Sundowner Rock, for instance. After scrambling up its boulder-strewn slopes — wishing for the agility of the bug-eyed, Bambi-like dik-diks that prance about this terrain — I flop down on a sun-warmed granite slab and savor an eagle’s eye view of the bushland below. Legions of acacias and wiry shrubs mottle the red earth.