Part 2_Episode 1_The expedition begins


Story Hunter. Part 2, episode 1 the Expedition Begins. The expedition began with Alex. He had lived with a group of Bushmen the year before and, even for him, one of South Africa's best trackers, it had been a master class in the old ways of the wild. The San People is the broad term for the name of many clans that make up the Bushmen. I will refer to the people I met with the term Bushmen, because that is how they asked me to refer to the.”Chap, these people are profoundly in tune with nature,” Alex told me one night around the fire. 


Ten years ago, Alex and a brilliant Shangan tracker named Renius Mhlongo, who I have written about in my books, both former Safari guides, had founded the Tracker Academy with South African philanthropist Gaynor Rupert. The academy is now a training division of the SA College for Tourism with a simple mission to preserve indigenous wisdom. With their partners, Alex and Renius had developed a programme that took young men and women from the most previously disadvantaged backgrounds and taught them their ancient art form of tracking. Alex and Renius had lived and worked for years at Londolozi prior to founding the academy. Nowadays Tracker Academy ran one of its bases from Londolozi Game Reserve, which is how I became a supporter. In my opinion, the Tracker Academy led by Alex had done more for the modern preservation of the art of tracking than any other organization, and Alex and I had a long history and hundreds of hours in the bush together, mostly focused on our passion for following wild animals. We know each other well. We lived and worked together at Londolozi for years before he went on to found the academy. Alex has been a roommate to me, a gym buddy, a mentor, a sparring partner. We've run tracking retreats together and we've been in all sorts of dangerous situations. 


There are some things in life that are rare and hard to define. The feeling that something is in someone's blood is rare, and that's the feeling you get around Alex. Alex and I recognize each other. A hat and boots don't make a cowboy. A cowboy is a way of being. It's like that with trackers. It's in you or it's not. Alex is a live wire of intensity. He puts out the energy of a honey badger. He has experience operating all over African remote conditions and, like me, he's prone to making things up as he goes along. 


And it's for all of these reasons that I said yes when I heard we'd been invited to the Kalahari to go and study with the Bushman people. We wanted to find out particularly what indigenous hunting skills were still being taught. We wanted to understand how closely the Bushmen people were still living in tune with nature. We wanted to find out what skills were being lost and what still survived. Particularly, we wanted to understand if the ancient hunting skills associated with the art of tracking were still being taught. We had heard that there were still some Bushmen who could do the mythical persistence hunt, but these stories were mired in rumours and uncertainty. We'd have to find out for ourselves. Joining us would be another guide by the name of James Tyrrell. James is a renowned safari guide and photographer. He also runs a production company. He's also an endurance athlete, a skill that we might need if the Bushmen took to running down game. 
We would operate from Botswana's frontier town of Maun, where we would gather supplies. For a week, we would go north into the Okavango Delta, where we were involved in a leopard tracking habituation programme. I'll tell you more about that. Then we would head south through the central Kalahari, a harsh 58,000 square kilometre wilderness, aiming for the town of Khansi, where a local woman named Annaline had agreed to host us and give us the lay of the land. Annaline had grown up in central Botswana and she could speak the Bushmen language and she had relationships with local Bushmen. She would be a great contact to connect us. From Ghansi we would head south into even more remote terrain, eventually aiming for the town of Hukunsi. Here we would have to be extremely self-sufficient, camping and handling brutally hot, dry conditions. Around Hukunsi, we hoped to meet someone who still knew the way of the persistence hunt. 


The great dance, as the persistent hunt is sometimes called, occurs in the heat of the day. A hunter will run on the trail of a kudu, which is a type of antelope. He runs when it's hot and at a time of year when the animal has had very little food. The hunter knows that the human body can dump heat faster than an antelope. Animals, particularly antelope, do not have sweat glands. He must track as he runs, entering into a state of consciousness that allows for outrageous endurance hours of running in incredible heat, in desert sand. While tracking, the hunter must give the antelope no time to rest. Over hours, as he runs, tracking the antelope, he flushes it repeatedly out of the shade until it is too hot to continue running. 




In the accounts I've heard of persistence hunts. Once the animal is tired in some way, it gives its spirit and body to the hunter. It literally lays at his feet and he kills it in a moment of deep communion and sacredness. This is an ancient hunting practice by an ancient people. The Bushmen people, like all hunter-gatherer cultures, have a profound respect for their prey and they consider the hunt a prayer in itself. This whole process is called, by the Bushmen people ,the Great Dance. It's an ancient practice by an ancient people, as I said, a practice with a deep respect for the wild, where only what is needed by the tribe is taken. 


The great dance is an art form that is being lost, for it requires not just profound endurance but also superb tracking skills and something more mysterious the ability, like all great trackers can, to attune one's consciousness to the animal, to run with an invisible thread of energy connecting the hunter and his quarry. I understand this becomes hard to talk about. We enter here into a mysterious body of ancient knowledge that defies logic. We start to enter the realms of the mysteries of the Polynesian wayfinders who could navigate across oceans with no instrumentation, or the song lines of the Aboriginal people who could sing songs that would guide them across their land, or the capacity of some native cultures for homing, the ability to walk directly back to where their home is from any distance, no matter how turned around. There are human capacities that are being lost, and we believe that the great dance is one of those mysteries. But we need to find out for ourselves. We need to actually be on the ground and experience it, to truly understand what goes on in that style of communion with the wild. 


Certainly, the Bushmen in Botswana have been through very difficult times, in fact, bushmen everywhere. They are the most displaced people in Africa. They have been pushed off their land by multiple tribes and colonial settlers. Like so many native people, they have been forced to live in small encampments, away from the rhythms of their old life. Moving them off their ancestral land is akin to killing the culture, as the Bushmen people find their culture in their relationship with the earth and with the desert they live in. I've heard that many communities isolated from their ancestral land have been ravaged by alcohol, which is, of course, a story all too common and painful around the world. The confidence I have in entering into an expedition and mission like this is that I have literally seen the Tracker Academy, reconnect hundreds of young men and women with the birthright of their indigenous wisdom, and I believe wholeheartedly in that mission. 


In the weeks before we depart for Botswana, we plan as best we can, but there are tremendous unknowns, and Alex loves this. We have to learn from the Bushmen, he says. We're going to have to let the desert take care of us. To be honest with you, we need to be a bit wild, he laughs. We've both been getting a bit bloody domestic. We need to shake it off. It's true. We'll need to turn on our nomadic genes, be willing to follow the tracks where they lead us, and we must be ready for the Kalahari. I've started running in the summer midday heat to get ready for long hours moving across the desert. I've stopped lifting weights for a few months now. I must try and get lighter In the weeks prior to departure. 


I have the sensation that something is occurring, something akin to what happens in your psyche when a ceremony has been called. It's like a part of me is already reaching into the future. In my dreams, I'm in the desert already with the first people. An owl has started visiting my dreams with messages. Nothing I can really decipher, but a sense that something is stirring in my unconscious mind. I'm already shedding my modern cultural mind state. In nature we see this deeper unconscious mind reflected as archetypal energies that we recognize when a lioness protects her young with ferocity. When a leopard kills another leopard's cubs, we glimpse the primal shadow of our own disowned unconscious mind. We see the archetypal energy of the mother. 


We too are programmed to grow, unfurl, go dormant at times on the natural pattern of life. We are filled with desires to lay seed. In the eyes of a lion we see a predator that lives in us, and in the flight of an eagle we see our nomadic longings for freedom. But certainly we meet ourselves in new ways in the wilderness. To explore this place at the intersection of nature and the human psyche is my deepest calling, and to be with the Bushman people is to go back through time to where this intersection is closer to the surface of consciousness. Every time I visit the wilderness within and no wilderness I take a step towards a life most will never come close to. And in some ways this is actually what I seek on this trip to be close to the wilderness. That brings me closer to my undomesticated self. Where Alex and James and I are going is into a rare place, a rare place in these modern times. We are going back to the wild.