As I walk, I watch the ground. There are ant nests everywhere. The more I study them, the more they look like little volcanoes, each one a perfect cone of soil with a miniature crater spewing ants from its center. Some of these pismire volcanoes are mere pimples. Others are collapsed and spent. The most impressive are veritable Krakataus of antdom. Occasionally, my gaze lifts to larger things: a zebra, a fleeing giraffe, a curious impala. 

Video by Make It Kenya

I've been walking with my friend Josphat Mako across the heart of Kenya's Maasai lands for five weeks now. I don't know how many kilometers we've covered and don't much care. For me, the pleasure has been in simply walking and getting to know these grasslands and the people and animals who call southern Kenya home. 

We've camped in the bush and listened to the whoop-whoop call of pacing hyenas. We've slept in the womblike mud-and-dung huts of the Maasai, drunk milky tea that tasted of wood smoke, watched at dawn as women in beaded jewelry opened corrals to allow floods of goats and sheep out to graze. Best of all, we've listened spellbound as old men recalled youths spent hunting ostriches and lions with spears. The cats, they said, were the easy ones. It was the ostriches that were hard. "The males don't run from the Maasai like lions do," one shaven-headed elder said. "They come toward you swaying from side to side, and you can't throw a spear and hope to hit them. An ostrich will stand his ground and fight until either you or he is dead."  

Author and travel writer Stuart Butler and his Maasai guide and companion Josphat Mako survey the landscape in the Mara North Conservancy adjacent to Kenya's world famous Maasai Mara National Reserve. | Photo by Make It Kenya/Stuart Price

As I walk, I tell myself to stay aware, because at any moment a dozy buffalo could rise up out of the grass, annoyed at being awakened. But the people who've lived here all their lives—shepherds and conservationists—worry about something else. The land, they say, is dying: Development is encroaching. Wildlife populations are crashing. Fences block ancient migration pathways for elephants and wildebeests. In the grasslands where humankind was born, the rhinos are almost gone.

Stuart Butler and Josphat Mako walk past giraffes and wildebeests as they cross the Mara North Conservancy. | Photo by Make It Kenya/Stuart Price

On the last day of our walk, a Maasai man falls into step beside us. We talk about the future and the past. He tells me that when he was a child, the scrub-coated hills that surround us echoed at night with the growl of lions. Today, the hills are silent. "These young Maasai children—they grow up now without ever hearing a lion roar at night. They don't even know what a lion sounds like," he says. "Things are changing for us. Once, we Maasai were lions. Tomorrow, we might only be ants."

This article appeared in the September/October 2016 edition with the headline "Once We Were Lions."