The Maasai Boy and the Stars

In a manyatta on the wide plains beneath the Ngong Hills lived a boy named Lekishon, who had counted twelve rainy seasons and believed, with the fierce certainty only a twelve-year-old can hold, that he was more than ready to become a moran, a warrior of his people. He had watched the older boys practice with their spears, admired the way they walked with straight backs and proud eyes, and he could not understand why his grandfather, Ole Karia, kept telling him, 'Not yet, Lekishon. Not yet.'

'I can run faster than Sironka,' Lekishon complained one evening, as the cattle settled into the boma for the night. 'I can throw a spear farther than Meoli. Why must I wait while smaller boys with less courage prepare for the warrior ceremony?'

Ole Karia, whose face carried the deep lines of eighty rainy seasons, considered his grandson for a long moment before he spoke. 'Running fast and throwing far are the easy parts of becoming a man, my grandson. They are the parts your body already knows. There is a harder part, one your body cannot teach you no matter how fast it runs.'

'What part is that, grandfather?'

'Come with me tonight, and I will show you, though I will not speak a single word of it. Tonight you will sleep outside the boma, beneath the open sky, alone, and you will count the stars until dawn. When the sun rises, you may tell me what you have learned, and then we will speak again of moranhood.'

Lekishon was thrilled. Counting stars sounded easy, even pleasant, certainly easier than the herding and fetching he did every day. He gathered his shuka around his shoulders, took his grandfather's walking stick for company, and settled onto a flat rock a short distance from the boma as the sun sank behind the hills.

At first it was exactly the adventure he had imagined. The sky above the plains, far from any fire's glow, filled slowly with more stars than he had ever properly noticed, scattered so thickly in places that they blurred into pale rivers of light. He began counting eagerly: one, two, three, ten, thirty, determined to reach some triumphant number he could report to his grandfather at dawn.

But the stars did not stay in neat rows waiting to be counted. New ones appeared as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, ones he had missed entirely at first glance. Clusters he thought he had already counted seemed, on a second look, to hold stars within stars, faint ones hiding behind brighter ones. By the time he reached what he believed was three hundred, he had lost track of where he began, and doubt crept in — had he counted that cluster near the horizon already, or only imagined he had?

The night grew cold, colder than he expected, and the wind off the plains found its way beneath his shuka no matter how tightly he wrapped it. A hyena's laugh rose somewhere in the darkness, closer than was comfortable, and Lekishon's earlier confidence shrank down to something smaller and more honest. He thought of calling out to the boma, only a short distance away, but pride kept his mouth shut, and in that silence he noticed something he had never noticed before: how loud his own frightened heartbeat sounded when there was nothing else to listen to.

He stopped counting. He simply sat, wrapped in his shuka, and watched. The stars did not hurry across the sky the way his thoughts had been hurrying all evening. They moved so slowly that if he stared at one point too intently, he could convince himself nothing was moving at all — and yet, when he looked away and returned his gaze an hour later, everything had shifted, the whole dome of the sky quietly rearranged without a single sound or announcement.

Somewhere in the deepest, coldest hour of the night, Lekishon understood, without anyone telling him, that he had been trying to conquer the sky the way he conquered a foot race — by speed, by will, by getting there first. But the sky was not a race. It moved at its own pace regardless of how badly he wanted to master it in one sitting, and the only thing his impatience had earned him was confusion and a lost count.

When dawn finally broke pink and gold over the plains, and the cattle began to stir in the boma, Lekishon walked back to his grandfather with tired eyes and empty hands.

'How many stars did you count, my grandson?' asked Ole Karia, though his eyes suggested he already guessed the answer.

'I do not know, grandfather. I lost count many times. The sky was too large and too patient for me.'

Ole Karia nodded slowly, and for the first time that Lekishon could remember, he smiled the particular smile he usually saved for the elders' council. 'That,' he said, 'is the hardest part of becoming a moran, and you have learned it in one night what takes some men many seasons to understand. A warrior's spear arm can be trained in a season, but a warrior's patience, his willingness to be small before something greater than himself, that is trained only by nights like the one you have just spent. Now you are closer to ready than you were yesterday, not because you counted the stars, but because you learned you could not.'

Lekishon never did finish counting the stars, not that night nor any night after, but from then on, when the older boys grew hasty or boastful before a hunt or a ceremony, it was often Lekishon, quiet and watchful, who reminded them that some things cannot be rushed, and that the night teaches patience to those willing to sit still long enough to be taught.