Part_2_Episode_8_The Cheetah


Story Hunter, part 2, episode 8, The Cheetah. 


We meet our Bushman friends Kekau, Khamku and Tamai at 5am. We drive out in an old land cruiser looking for fresh tracks.


The desert at dawn is cool and Eland and Gemsbok move through the arid landscape as ghostly apparitions. Kekau is our de facto leader. At 60 years old he's energetic and sprightly from life in the bush.


These bushman people are diminutive of size and yet they move with tremendous endurance and speed across the desert. And around them, even a seasoned walker, I can't help but feel like a big, lumbering white guy. 


Seeing Alex with the bushman has a strange resonance. Alex, shorter and a lifelong tracker, free of spirit, I can't shake the feeling that he has had many previous lives with the Bushman people. James is a fountain of energy. He's hungry for fresh tracks and adventure and his presence injects excitement into every activity. Let's go as deep as we can into this desert, he says as we drive along. It's an attitude I find igniting. 


Soon Kekau cuts the tracks of a cheetah. We decide we'll follow. Part of the reason the bushmen are such formidable trackers is the soft sand of the Kalahari. By dawn each day, stories are written in great detail in the sand. And it was these stories that the Bushmen began to tell thousands of years ago as humans evolved in Africa. It is for this reason that whoever you are, wherever you are, I can assure you a tracker lives inside your genetic code. 


In the morning light, the cheetah tracks are easy to see as the sun throws a contrast of shadow into the track. What follows is a highly unspoken competitive tracking environment. The bushmen take the tracks, Khamkhu leading fast, pointing his tracking stick at the trail like a divining rod. They begin to set a pace through the bush. Moving at a tremendous lick, weaving through the Kalahari sand and low scrub. I get the feeling they want to show us tracker to tracker what they can do. We, of course, want the front of the trail, and so a peloton-like environment develops. I'll work my way up to the lead of the race on the front of the track for as long as I can. One step off it and I lose the lead to Temai or Kakao, who will hold the lead until we can regain it. We fly through the bush, cutting and weaving on the track. One missed track at the front and someone else takes the lead tracker position.  This would be Olympic level tracking. 


The atmosphere is electric between us. The love for the art form dissolves the massive cultural divide between us. Now we speak one language, the language of tracking. Alex takes the lead and sets a pace, but loses it to Kakao. The track's cut right and James picks him up as he takes the lead, but the cheetah turns and Kakao has him.


We are moving so fast and with such engaged concentration that small thorns tear at our clothes without us noticing. The environment is joyfully competitive. We can see that we outgunned by the local trackers. This is their home turf and try as we may to give a good account of ourselves, they seem to have margins ahead of us. James is back at the lead and he holds the front skillfully. We find soft markings where the cheetah lay in the sand resting.
Now Kakao has it. In places the thorn is so thick that we have to crawl. The bushmen crouch and move under the spiky branches, way too fast for us to keep up with.


I'm struck again by how perfectly at home they are in the desert. They carry no water. They move with efficiency. They belong here. We, by contrast, crawl on our bellies, pulling our packs full of water through the sand, bleeding from cuts and gashes on our arms and legs. I feel lumbering.


Temai is 13 years old. He loves being in the bush with his grandfather Kakao. It's beautiful to watch the old skills being transferred.


Temai is blasting through a three hour walk like it's a morning stroll. He's rumored to often escape school and walk 70km through the night to get home. Do you know any 13 year olds who would walk 70km through the leopard filled night alone? 


The cheetah crosses out of the reserve into no man's land, a huge strip of waterless bush that separates the Kalahari Game Reserve from the cattle farming. We go under the fence like a pack of Wild Dogs in hot pursuit.


 If it's one thing that Alex and I know, it's trackers. We've literally spent thousands of hours staring at trackers.


Look how passionate these guys are about following, Alex says to me. It's that passion for the front of the trail you can't train. A tracker has it or he doesn't.


And I've always thought of enthusiasm as a superpower. The light is climbing higher, flattening the aspect of the tracks. And by 8.45, the desert oven is starting to crank.


And with it, the hyper-competitive environment at the front of the trail starts to relax. There are complicated sections where we must pick the track of the cheetah through leopard and brown hyena tracks, all blown out in the soft sand into obscure smudges. Through all of this, Kekau conducts himself with the esteem of a wise elder.


He lets us young bloods push each other. But when the trail is lost, it is often he who refines it and resets us on our hasty following. He quietly stamps his authority with his skill.


Cats in the Kalahari cover huge distances, and this cheetah is walking us off our feet. By 10.30am, the heat is blazing and water starts to run low. I'm always chronically aware of water, as one should be in the desert. 


The thirst that the dry air of the desert creates is unlike any I have felt before. Tomorrow we go deeper into the desert and will be totally unassisted. Our water and self-management will have to be on point to avoid serious danger.


Eventually the heat is too much and we decide to leave the tracks and walk 8 or 10 kilometers back to our camp. The equation is always a two-way mindset around water conservation. It's not the five hours walking out of camp, it's knowing you will have to walk all of that back towards the camp, probably with way less water or no water.


Today the cheetah has beaten the trackers, but we've been truly lucky to receive a masterclass in desert tracking. We leave the track and there are great vibes between us and our new friends. Back at camp we crash with exhaustion, finding anywhere cool we can to rest and recover.


My watch says we followed the cheetah for nearly 16 kilometers. In the late afternoon we meet up again with our bushman friends when the temperature drops a little bit. Kakao has bought his wife and daughter.


Small children play in the sand. Kakao's wife plays a makeshift guitar-like instrument, which is wire on a bowed stick leaned on a pot. The result is an unusual twanging with a percussion in it. We sing and dance and it's lovely. I like this place and these people. I can feel them.


The children teach us a game that involves trying to skim a stick off the sand. Some people are traditionally dressed, others wear city clothes. Alex takes some time to share the mission of the Tracker Academy and officially invites any young people who would like to come and train for certification as trackers.


Alex's passion for tracking is always manifest as his service to the art. Kakao responds first in his own language. If you are serious, he says, we will consider your offer. There are many young people who are not learning to track anymore.


And I certainly do not wish to make broad statements about the Bushman people. All I can tell you is many old skills live on in modern Bushman life as a necessity. Even as they adapt like everyone is to a changing planet and changing times, I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised to find a lifestyle changed but cultural knowledge still being practiced.


There is a story I hear one night around the fire. It's a story of a plane crash in the Kalahari many years ago. After the plane crashed, the people stayed with the plane as is protocol.
It's easier to search for a plane than people in a vast desert. The passengers had very little water and without them knowing it, they did not realize that the pilot had failed to file a flight plan. No one was coming, no one knew where they were.


They were terribly thirsty and on the brink of death. It was a Bushman who eventually found them, some already dead, others on the brink. Before he ran back to civilization to alert the authorities, he dug up melons full of water that were just under the soil all around the crash site. It was those melons that saved the lives of some of the very dehydrated passengers. 


As I go to bed, the story stays with me. It's prophetic of so many things. We are living in scarcity on the most abundant orb in the galaxy. We are starving for a purposeful life on the most alive planet ever known. We must put down the ideals a sick culture has sold us and turn inwards to a track that shimmers in clear sand inside us. You will know your track by how alive it makes you. That inner track of aliveness is your birthright. It will take you on a trail to a place where the first people still live, to a place of quiet abundance where you can always drink in a world everyone else thinks is dry.