By then they were raising perennial plants instead of chickens and the plants didn’t need their constant attention, so they could travel. I could not have been happier, as the reason for their offer was to help me take care of my children—Stephanie, age four, and John, age two—when I was out in the field. Steve came too, but only for a few weeks because he was still in graduate school. The photographer Tim Asch also came with us and took hundreds of photographs, many of which appeared in Warrior Herdsmen, the book I eventually wrote about the Dodoth. On his own, he also made a splendid film called Dodoth Morning. We took tents and other equipment with us, and I bought a Land Rover when we got to Kampala. At the time, Edward Frederick Mutesa II was kabaka, king of the Baganda people, and while in Kampala we visited the Basi Kabaka’s tomb, built for three of King Mutesa’s predecessors, including his father. We were awed by the large traditional building made of thatched poles, very dark in its wide interior, where, when our eyes adjusted, we saw a stuffed leopard and long curtains of bark cloth concealing something unknown to us but obviously important.
