The Collection Center is also where my brothers first heard the stories of buffaloes from the Aberdares leaving their natural habitat at night and joining herds of cows to graze. They heard that lots of farmers in the Kirima area are very cautious when fetching their cows for milking early in the morning because buffaloes are likely to be amongst them. To put ‘meat’ in their story, they warned the boys: “When you go round up your cows for milking at 4 am, and you see a stubborn ‘cow’ that is not responding to the beam of your flashlight, you better ran and climb the nearest tree because that is a buffalo and it can outrun Shekha Mehta in his safari rally car”.
The boys never saw a buffalo amongst our cows and neither did they hear of anybody in our Settlement Scheme who encountered one. But that story was front and center in their minds every time they approached the cows because, who knew the day the buffaloes will come calling. They did not want to take any chances.
