Part_2_Episode_ 9_The Great Dance


Story Hunter part two, episode nine. The Great Dance


The first time I was ever exposed to the idea of persistence hunting, it was after watching Craig Foster's film The Great dance in the early 2000s and so I must credit Craig with planting the seed of this incredible, ancient practice. In my mind, certainly it had a profound impact on both Alex and I, and now, nearly 20 years later, we are here in the Kalahari trying to find out if this ancient practice still exists. 


There is a beautiful feeling to driving into the middle of nowhere, and frankly anywhere west of Hukuntsi is the middle of nowhere. My god, the land is vast and empty. White desert sand, tall camelthorn trees, rolling plains of dry grass, that just goes on and on and on. The temperature gauge on the vehicle gives a casual outside reading of 46 degrees at three in the afternoon.


We bump along dirt roads into a wildlife concession roughly the size of Switzerland that not a single tourist visits. This land is not even game reserve, it's simply the Botswana wildlands. 


We came to Botswana with a theory. If we could find those who still practice persistence hunting, it would tell us so much about the depth of tracking skills still alive in the Bushmen people. I realize now that for me the persistence hunt is symbolic, and that's why we came to find if it's still practiced. There cannot be persistence hunting without deep tracking skills.


Persistence hunting, or the great dance, takes something only a person of the wilderness could really understand or achieve. For one, one would have to be deeply comfortable with the elements. It's 46 degrees as we speak. You would need to be fit from a life outdoors, adapted to incredible heat and dryness. You would have to be able to track at a continuous run. The hunter would need to read the gait of the animal to continuously be able to assess its speed.


All of these skills put together mean that if you find persistence hunting, you find a human deeply in tune with the wild. And this is what we came to look for. 


We arrive at our camp on the shores of a dry pan and meet the professor. The professor does incredible work in the area through his NGO, Kalahari Research and Conservation. Here he works to protect wild areas and build relationships with the communities. The professor has gathered 10 Bushmen trackers via bush telegraph from far and wide to participate in an experiment around this ancient hunting practice. There are formalities and introductions around the campfire. As nightfall, barking geckos call in the sand all around our tents. Alex asks the guys, Guys, we are here to learn about persistence hunting. Have any of you done it? Can any of you do it? There's a long silence around the fire and then an old Bushman named Wurster answers. He said, I did it when I was young, but I'm old now and I haven't done it for years. As he says this, he pulls on a big joint of boxer tobacco.


There's a mixture of young and old around the fire and immediately a debate starts to rage. Most people say it no longer exists. We hunt with horses now, one young man tells us, but we will show you how it used to be done. Ons gan probeer. We will try, says Vista in Afrikaans. What is decided is that the next morning will be shown how it used to be done. 


What I'm discovering is that Bushman culture still exists inside a very different Bushman lifestyle. No one is fully living in the old ways. Rather, the old ways of gathering, tracking and hunting exist within modern Bushman life. Just under the surface of towns and jobs and shops, the culture simmers.


Our experiment is nuanced and complicated. It's decided that the Bushman trackers will demonstrate how they know persistence hunting to work. We will attempt to hunt a kudu so that the Bushmen can show us how it used to be done. However, we will not kill our quarry. We agree to a game time demonstration of skills. As it turns out, this is an experiment for all of us.


For the Bushmen, it's an act of remembering. For us, it's a new discovery. We have no idea what the outcome will be.


There is no purer form of hunting than subsistence hunting. And all through this care must be taken for the kudu we will track and pursue. The next morning we strike out with our team.


In truth, we look like a motley crew, young and old, dressed in old soccer shirts, football club Barcelona, one guy's wearing soccer cleats. The clothes of the Bushmen trackers are all ripped and torn. We have to stop regularly for everyone to take a huge tobacco joint smoke break.


After six hours of looking for tracks, what happens next is one of the most profoundly magical experiences I have ever had in the bush and as a tracker. We cut across fresh tracks of a kudu. There's a palpable shift in energy. The young men, who the whole morning have seemed disengaged, are suddenly walking fast on the track. I can immediately tell these guys are hot trackers. All through the morning they smoked and seemed disinterested, but now a gear has changed. There's some type of primal activation. 


Without a word being said between them, one of the youngsters starts to trot. And with that, the entire energy of the group changes. The hunt is on. James and I are running with the front group. They are tracking and jogging fast through the bush. The sand underfoot is heavy and soft. It's akin to running on the beach. 


The temperature is 45 degrees and soon the group drops me. My backpack is clanging against my head. I feel awkward and laborious. The group is accelerating into a dog trot and they are moving at a deceptive speed.


I take my pack off and throw it in a land cruiser that is about half a kilometer behind the trackers. They go over the horizon. They move like cavalry.


I jump onto the sideboard of the land cruiser. Catch me up! I scream to the driver. I leap on the bonnet and the driver guns cross country to the group so I can hit the ground running.


The kudu is nowhere to be seen, but his tracks are huge explosions in the sand. He's running fast. Not a word has been said. Something organic and intuitive has taken over.


If humans have one massive advantage over animals, it's that humans dump heat faster than animals. This means a runner with the necessary endurance and the right type of heat in the right season can run the animal down.


James is running extremely well. All his hours of training and triathlons paying off. He's keeping stride with the Bushmen.


I'm lumbering behind as a sort of relay begins, something akin to how a pack of wild dogs would hunt. The lead runner runs hard. Under no circumstances should we stop. Constant pressure must be applied to the kudu. When the lead tracker tires, a second runner takes over. We've entered into an instinctual space.Something is happening to time. I find myself transported to that peculiar feeling I have touched sometimes when I've taken mushrooms or in deep meditation. I am so present nothing else in the world exists, yet everything is connected in one giant unfolding.


I can feel as I run I'm being initiated. I touch the now, pure presence, the secret under the secret of what we all really want. 


While we run on the trail of the kudu there is terrible suffering in the Middle East. While we run a close friend's father is dying. While we run I come to know that the woman I'm in love with is not ready for a relationship.  While we run I go back in time to when this is how we all lived. While we run I go into the far future beyond the technological revolution, all the way to the world reset -pProgress and a world with clean air and rivers. While I run, lungs burning and screaming, I'm forced into a closeness with myself and in that closeness I know for the first time in my life that I want children. Running wild through the plains, tracking as we run, each person energetically in sync with the others. The heat is brutal, the sand is brutal, my heart beating in my chest, the Bushmen runners are so strong.


Suddenly for a moment I find myself at the front. I'm weaving through the bush following the tracks of the kudu, sweating, breathing alive, my eyes deeply attuned to every explosion on the earth where a kudu's foot touched down. The feeling of tracking at speed is deeply engaging. It's concentration with a somatic component, athleticism and intellectualism, something like running while reading a complicated book.


It's a deep state of full body engagement, running where the kudu ran, In the heat as he runs. In the sand as he runs, who will break first? Out in front, somewhere a long way ahead of us, I can feel the kudu running. The bushman can see by the tracks that they're closing the distance, the heat is unspeakable, the kudu starts to run to shady trees. But some incredible energetic has descended on us, we run on, everyone wild with exhaustion.


Soon we sight the kudu up ahead, he bolts, again leaving explosions in the sand where his hooves were. From here we run another 40 minutes on nothing but his tracks. Now we see him again, just a glimpse as he disappears into the bushes, we run another 20 minutes on his trail.


Alex, our great leader, watches from the roof of a land cruiser. From there he can watch the hunt like a general surveying the field, he can assess individual skill, approach, he can also assess when to call the hunt off. We sight the kudu again on the next horizon, this time he does not run but hides in the shade, he is too hot. We immediately call the hunt off seeing that he is tiring and we do not want to push him.


The Bushmen are extremely unhappy about this and complain, they are full with hunting spirit but we must not push on. 


As we come to a stop there is a deep awareness that something has happened, a remembering. Before we came to Botswana everyone told us the persistence hunt could not be done, it was lost. The story was that the great dance was danced no more. And with it an ancient and profound spiritual component of the Bushmen's culture and connection to nature was lost. To hunt is to merge with the realms of the animals, done sacredly and for persistence that which was hunted was received as a blessing from the wild. But here in the middle of nowhere we have found something, it has been remembered.


And more than that the Bushmen themselves have remembered. There is a sense in the air that something important beyond comprehension has occurred, a pride in the old ways. This ancient art that takes incredible endurance, precise tracking and heat conditioning, these young Bushmen have reignited their own pride in their skills. We are the ones who have all it takes to do this, their eyes say with pride. Look at us, this is our world. 


The bushmen have been subjugated as many first people of the modern world have, but here in the ancient world that is both past and yet to come when the apocalypse finds us, the bushmen people are supreme. The first nation people hold an irreplaceable way of being in their very essence and it is that way that teaches us.


Eyes mired by the neon light and the audacious scale of modern life could easily miss it, yet they are a living reminder to what humanity has forgotten. Today when I look into the eyes of the men around me I'm profoundly aware of a secret they know that they are holding. It's the secret of what we really are and where we really came from and I'm so struck by the feeling that they know what we have all forgotten.


And I suspect that until we remember what they know there will always be something we anxiously long for and mourn just under the surface of our lives. The most confusing grief is for something you don't even know you lost. It is this undiagnosed absence that mires our life.


When we get back to the camp it's like we come out of a portal. We are back. The bushmen go and smoke under the trees. Alex, James and I keep staring at each other. Something has happened we can't explain but we were together for it. Only the three of us can know the energy of that run. We need to sleep. I need to cry. A huge storm blows into the desert and I think of the kudu drinking moisture off the leaves.


I pray for him and what he taught us today. The contract is complete.