The personal journal of a young American woman who lived for six months amongst the Dodoth cattle-herdsmen in Northern Uganda, while they were caught up in an escalating cycle of violence with their age-old rivals, the Turkana tribe. The tension of this feud was the tradition of cattle raiding, but it escalated to unprecedented levels of violence when the then new states of Uganda and Kenya were drawn in to police these ancient clan frontiers. Thomas's total immersion in the life of this tribe in 1961 takes us with her, as with clarity and a lyrical eye for detail she brings their whole culture alive. Though not an academic, she had spent much time in the field with her mother, who was the world's leading authority on the Bushman of the Kalahari. So it was natural for her to take her own young children on this adventure, where she proves herself a brave, humane, and unshockable witness to the life of the warrior herdsman.