Women’s stories and experiences with wildlife 823
continued on her way. When she reached the boma she was in tears and explained to the elders that there was a lion and she was afraid. Ilmurran [young men of the ‘warrior’ age-set] followed her tracks back and found the lion, with the child still sitting at its feet. The lion was trying to stop another lion from killing the child. The mother felt so ashamed that she offered her own breast milk [a sign of peace and forgiveness] to the lion. The ilmurran went to fetch a goat and gave it to the lion to eat.
Another story tells of a woman travelling to her father’s home. She stopped along the way, tired and hungry, to pray for help. She had a small child with her and put it down on the path. A lion, seeing the mama and her child, killed a gazelle and brought it to the mama to feed her child. After hearing this story, the young men who had wanted to kill the lion, instead offered it a goat. In 2019 we were told the following by a group of elderly
women:
The lion is an animal that helps and cannot harm women.Women are the main ones responsible for looking for firewood to cook with and charcoal to use. Here, long ago, when women would go to the bush to look for firewood if there was a lion, the lion would inevitably break a branch to let the women know of its presence. But if we were men? Then the lion would not do this, but rather the lion would start to move away because it understands that men are their enemy, therefore it can start a fight any time at all, because long ago the ilmurran would walk with weapons for war. Ilmurran are the big enemy of lions as they are indeed the guards to protect livestock (cattle, sheep, goats).
Yetmen’s relations with lions are also nuanced and complex. This same group of women told a story about an injured lion that was helped by an olmurrani [warrior] of the Mamasita clan, who put his own life at risk by attending to the lion, to take a thorn from his paw. The story ends by explaining that, ‘after a little while the olmurrani succeeded at removing the thorn. He left, and the lionwent on his way. This iswhen the friendship began. That is why a lion cannot eat an olmurrani of this clan unless there is someone who is cursed by his parents or the elders for wrongly treating the lions.’ Even when lions are hunted byMaasai, it is seen as a bat-
tle of equals, where either the lion or theMaasai may face a loss. As a group of elderly women explained to us in 2019, ‘long ago, when the sun was rising, the women would pray and would say, “If it is not a child of a lion that is killed, then it will be the child of aMaasai, so eitherway,wemust pray.”’ The above stories reflect feelings about and relations with
lions; expectations of behaviour that show respect for lions and see them as individuals, and similar respect by lions for people (if both groups act accordingly). Other stories about animals reflect their role in mediating human–human as well as human–animal relations. One story explains that when women are married, they are told they should not look back when they walk to their new home, lest they turn into an elephant. ‘That is why we say elephants are women who looked back on the day they were taken to their husbands’, one elder woman explained. Similar stories are told by Maasai in Kenya to explain the presence of ele- phants (Roque dePhino, pers. comm., 2020).
A Soliga woman and her teenage daughter also told us a
story of the origin of elephants stemming from the strife of a new bride:
Many years ago, a new daughter-in-law came to the boy’s house. They were growing different kinds of millet and betel nut, and they used to grind and pound and then eat it. The mother-in-law would give the grain to the daughter-in-law and ask her to grind it every day while she would just relax. How tired would the daughter-in-law get, imag- ine! Doing this every day! In those days they had huge vessels and sieves for the grain. One day she got so tired of it, that when the mother-in-law had gone to the fair (at that time they had to walk through the forest), she got tired of pounding and took the pounding stick and made it into the trunk of the elephant. The sieve (shaped like a dustpan) became the ears. The millet storage basket was the stomach. She placed all of this under the bamboo tree.. . It was then time. Soon it became an elephant and came to life. Then it picked up a big seegekai [Acacia concinna] seed. When the mother-in-law came back, the ele- phant killed her for torturing the daughter-in-law and then went off into the forest. That’s why there are elephants in the forest today.
Soliga women also sing specific songs at festivals or during the harvest season about their social and natural worlds. As an elder woman explained, ‘it is mostly the women who tell stories and sing. Every forest has a story, the names, the things that happened there. Trees also have stories.’ We found that Soliga women’s labour practices also con-
tributed to knowledge and observations about wildlife, both in the forest and in their homes. Nearly all the women we spoke with stated that men and women shared the work of both forest collection and cultivation. As articulated by one woman, ‘men and women access the forest equally, there are no places where only some go’.Women explained that when collecting honey or gooseberries, men climbed the trees and women collected lower down.Women also ex- pressed concerns over reduced availability of honey, which they explained as related to biodiversity loss resulting from the suppression of traditional Soliga fire management by the forest department. Gendered divisions of labour in the Tiger Reserve have
shifted over time as a result of increased restrictions on for- est access and the suppression of traditional management strategies. Soliga are now largely dependent on wage labour, which is mostly given tomen, leading women to use the for- est more regularly, including daily grazing of livestock and other forest-related activities. This is heightened during the fire season (summer) when Soliga movements are highly monitored. As one woman explained:
During the fire season it is difficult to go into the forest. Now with re- duced rain and after the Lantana [an invasive plant] has taken over, there is no water, making it even more difficult to go into the forest. It is easier for women.Women don’t smoke so they are not suspected of lighting fires. Women also only take small things for the home like firewood or tubers. Men are the ones who collect the bigger things, so they cannot go as freely.
When women are in the forest, they often encounter wild- life. Onewoman described with excitement her observations about various wildlife:
Wesee lots of elephants, bears and deer. I sawa 7 ft long python! It had just swallowed a bird and it was sitting on a tree. They stay on the tree till all the bones digest and then whatever they can’t digest comes out of
Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 818–826 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000363
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