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I loved cattle, as I do to this day. There is romance in cattle. Human involvement with the whole cattle tribe reaches back into so distant a past, and is so recurrent, that it rivals our association with the dog. I do not wish to belittle dogs. But it is not usually the dog we find adorning the walls of ancient European cave dwellings or the millennia-old Saharan rock shelters that pre-date the current desert conditions. It is drawings of cattle: single animals, groups of cattle, cattle by the score; bison and buffalo, the domestic cow and its wild ancestor, the aurochs. The earliest known great art, the best of the paintings discovered on French and Spanish cave walls, dating to between ten and twenty thousand years in our past, are of bison. In the Saharan Tassili massif, polychrome and monochrome domestic cattle herds, sometimes of great beauty and obviously precious to their owners, walk or stand on sandstone faces. My liking for the Maasai grew with increasing acquaintance. I learned to feel at home in that mixture of smells that mean a Maasai dwelling -- cattle, cattle dung, smoke, punctuated by the distinctive sound of Olmaa. No doubt, as they decide to adopt a less tribal way of life, the Maasai will succeed in all fields. Not that I wish to condemn their tribal way of life. Someone said to me once as we stood near the top of Natakili hill, just south of Lolgorien, \"If every day I could climb a hill like this one and look into the distance, across all these breathtaking miles and miles of country, and feel it is all mine, then neither would I wish to change my lifestyle.\" That herd was not very large, as buffalo herds go -- under 150 in all. Lolgorien would have been able to support a thousand or more, but even though the human population had remained small and did not deny the land to wild animals, the buffaloes had undergone two major crises in recent times. First was a massive dying off from the great rinderpest outbreak that hit East Africa just before the turn of the century and lingered for years. Later, during the gold-mining episode, buffaloes and various antelopes were shot wholesale for laborers' rations. But when that was over, there still remained buffaloes around Lolgorien and, although never fully protected, they were less troubled from then on.