Marshall - Dreaming of Lions My Life in the Wild Places

Advance Praise for Dreaming of Lions

Dreaming of Lions is as mesmerizing as its title. Its filled with lions, elephants, hyenas, and wolves; hunter-gatherers, tribal shamans, and African despots; death-defying escapes, dazzling victories, and personal strugglesand always-glorious prose. Staggeringly original and bluntly honest, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has written a book about a life lived fearlessly and fiercelya life that not only forever changed the way we view other peoples but also transformed the way we understand the rest of animate creation.

Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus and The Good Good Pig

We are lucky to have shared some time on Earth with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Like a shaman of words, she connects us as if by magic with other worlds hidden on our own planet. And she is the last best writer to have deeply witnessed with her own eyes the people at the cradle of humanity. Reading her is like looking through a telescope and realizing that the brightness you see actually happened long, long ago, and has taken all this time to reach your own eyes.

Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

Elizabeth Marshall Thomass affirming, finely observed memoir recounts a life in the process of being fully and unapologetically lived; a gift from someone with an endlessly curious mind and more than eight decades on the planet. But perhaps the greatest gift of Dreaming of Lions is Marshall Thomass signal talent: It leaves the reader feeling far less alone in the world and much more deeply connected to it.

Alexandra Fuller, author of Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

It would be a gross understatement to say that Dreaming of Lions is a stunning book. Thomas is confronted by Idi Amin in Uganda; she digs roots with women gatherers in the Kalahari. In Ibadan, Nigeria, she witnesses tribal violence, religious sacrifice, and resistance to western medicine. She is a keen observer of lions, hyenas, and wild wolves. All this is interwoven with her own personal history to form a memoir of extraordinary power.

Maxine Kumin, author of Where I Live , former United States Poet Laureate

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes with all her sense of a lifelong love affair with our planet and its astonishing life. She is a meticulous observer of human diversity and the hidden ways of animals, responding with empathy and reminding us to look with wonder.

Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Further Life

Also by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World

The Old Way: A Story of the First People

The Social Lives of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company

Certain Poor Shepherds: A Christmas Tale

The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture

The Hidden Life of Dogs

The Animal Wife

Reindeer Moon

Warrior Herdsmen

The Harmless People

Copyright 2013, 2016 by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

All rights reserved.

Color insert images on page 2, the top two images on page 3, and the top left image on page 8 are the gift of Laurence K. Marshall and Lorna J. Marshall. President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. PM image numbers order of appearance: PM# 2001.29.793 (99060008); 2001.29.500 (98740070); 2001.29.876 (99170061); 2001.29.423 (98630060); 2001.29.138 (90560015); 2001.29.23.1 (90510023); 2001.29.408 (98520027); 2001.29.461 (99060015); 2001.29.875 (99070098).

Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Originally published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013 as A Million Years with You .

This edition published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016.

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing March, 2016.

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Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Dreaming of Lions was printed on paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

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In loving memory of Pearl

Contents

Prologue: Gaia

I like to look at the stars, so far away, so steady on their paths through the sky. Theyve been credited to Gaia, the goddess whose name means Earth and who is best known for managing our planet, orbiting a little star among 4 billion others in our galaxy. Even so, however small, our planet is complex and took 4.5 billion years to reach the state in which we know it, thanks to measures which were also credited to Gaia. Imagine it: The crashing meteors! The chemical reactions! The climate changes! The ever-branching climb of evolution that turned bacteria into blue whales and giant sequoias, not to mention the millions of other life forms that we know today! If she could do all that, could she not have made the stars and written the laws of physics? According to the ancient Greeks she could. She made the earth, then made the universe to be its equal.

While wandering down the road of life, it helps to look for something more meaningful than oneself. Some find it in religion. Some find it in relationships. I find it by keeping my eyes open. I see the stars when I look up and the soil when I look down, where the microorganisms live that keep everything going. And as far as Im concerned, this can be personified by Gaia.

One day my wonderful cousin, Tom Bryant, came to visit me and my husband, Steve, at our home in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Tom, an astronomer, was marvelously familiar with everything now known about the universe, and wishing to show us some of it, he brought a very large telescope. That night, after the moon set, a group of us went to the edge of a field where, in the northeastern sky, Tom pointed out what seemed to be a tiny, fuzzy star, just one among dozens of others, and not all of us were sure just which star we should be looking at. Tom then showed us the star through his telescope. This made it larger, about the size of a grass seed. It seemed to be a spiral and looked something like a snail seen from the rear.

It was part of Andromeda, Tom told us, a constellation of about four thousand stars, nine of which are known to have planets. But the tiny, snail-like thing we were looking at was not an individual star at all, and it wasnt a planet. It was a cluster of a trillion stars, collectively known as the Andromeda Galaxy, three times bigger than our Milky Way and closer to us than any other spiral galaxy. Its light had traveled for 2.5 million years before it reached us. When the light we saw that night left its galaxy, our Homo habilis ancestors were figuring out how to make stone tools. By the time that same light reached us, we were modern Homo sapiens with telescopes. Wow!