Part_2_Episode_10_The Kalahari Lion


Storyhunter part two, episode ten, the Kalahari lion. 


The next day, driving towards Kar Pan in a state of elation from the kudu hunt, we cut fresh tracks of a single lion walking across the road. The tracks are from after a splattering of rain that blew through the desert like a squall sometime during the night, giving us a very accurate sense of when this lion moved.


Wuster, at 57 years old and just under five feet tall, is a true tracker. The tracks set a kinetic energy in him. He starts moving on the tracks, and we need to rein him in as we get ready.


The professor had told us that they regularly track lions for 30 to 70 kilometers for his lion monitoring project. Kalahari lions are renowned to move huge distances for food. They often go for weeks without drinking, living on blood and moisture.


To spend a day in this desert landscape is to cultivate a profound sense of the animal's resilience. To feel the heat and dryness and the crippling throat-burning thirst fills one with a profound humility and reverence for the wild creatures who live out here. 


With each day, Alex, James and I have been sinking into the natural camaraderie that comes to men who are in the bush together facing hardship and uncertainty. As we put our gear on, James says, This is going to be brutal. I'm so happy. We're constantly handing each other water, electrolytes, a hat, sun cream, some food, some tape for a blister. One of us always has what the other needs.


We operate as a small unit. Alex bandages a blister on his toe, and we fill our bottles with water and set off. 


It's hard for me to explain Kalahari tracking. The conditions are perfect. The sand allows you to move fast and flow on the trail, allowing a beautiful state of presence. Occasionally, when the lion changes his line, we step off his track. We only need to drift right or left to be back on. The tracking is easy, the terrain is not. 


The heat and the dryness are such a dimension. The bushmen are totally unaffected by both. They move at tremendous pace, wearing jackets and bandanas, while we try and shed layers. I glance at my watch and see that we're doing about 10 minutes and 40 seconds per kilometer, which is a hell of a fast walk for tracking. With each step, the lion takes us deeper into the dry wilderness. And soon I realize this is more of an endurance event than a tracking job. 


It's quite rare nowadays for most people to take a three-hour walk. Even more rare to walk three hours in the heat, but we blast through three hours like it's a cakewalk. At four hours, Vista is bouncing with intensity. He hasn't even thought of water yet.


Somewhere behind us, a support vehicle, from the professor's research team, follows. The lion has been walking all night, and his tracks next to ours seem older. He takes us deeper and deeper into the desert.


Walking at this pace, one simply cannot keep ahead of the hydration curve. My mouth is desperate for water. Vista, the tracker, pushes the pace, seemingly totally unaffected by the heat and conditions.


Walking on the lion's trail in this huge wilderness, I think again about my own fragility against the animals. The desert forces life to cling to the edge of survival. There is no margin for error.


Few environments cultivate extreme mindfulness like the desert, for there is simply no margin for you to make a mistake. You must be deeply deliberate with every action. To drink all the water you are carrying or lose the support vehicle would put you in an immediately dangerous position.


The lion walks on, trotting, walking. In the tracks, I can almost feel his hunger. He must move to find game. He must move to live. Through the night, he has taken breaks to sleep, leaving perfect lion-sized impressions in the sand. I become so attuned on the front of the trail to his movement, I don't even need to look down.


My feet take me where my eye unconsciously grabs search images of lion feet. It's like how you don't need to try to drive, you just find yourself driving. Occasionally, the Bushmen light rough tobacco joints rolled in newspaper and track while they smoke, showing no sign of slowing.


What adds to the struggle is the soft sand and unexpected ground squirrel holes. They serve as a constant booby trap where you step on hard ground and it simply gives way underneath you into a maze of subterranean squirrel burrows. Say that five times, subterranean squirrel burrows.


The result is you're always pulling yourself out of shin-high sand. Alex falls in a hole while I'm talking to him. James goes down. I sink constantly. 


Let me recap here. We're getting an endurance hiding from the local trackers, falling in squirrel holes, dehydrating, sweating, burning in the soft sand and literally having the best time of our life. Suffering together in wild places turns out to be fantastic. My body loves to move. I like how much it hurts. I like being this far from any other person and I love watching the Bushmen trackers as masters of their environments. 


The Kalahari lion walks on. And as he walks on, he teaches us about commitment and resolve. The beauty of practicing an art form at high levels is that it will teach you about every other part of your life. Now this lion has become a teacher.


With each step he teaches the tracker about resolve, grit. My whole life I've been afflicted by the desire to maintain optionality. And while it has given gifts, it has also taken something from me.


The Kalahari lion feels like he comes to me with a trail of maturing. The time of my life to maintain optionality is over. What is left is total commitment to finding him.


Total commitment to total commitment. If turning 40 is anything, it's a boat burning. I'm lucky to know what my vocation is. But now it must be committed to, with Kalahari-lion stamina. James looks at me. We go till we find it.


If you don't know what the track is in your own life, then you must discover it. If you know what the track is, then you must follow it to the end of your endurance. As far into the wilderness as you can. To the edge of thirst and then beyond. Being irrational is an edge. Insanity is an edge. Harnessed madness becomes not sanity but intensity. One shouldn't underestimate intensity. The lion walks on, but now his trail changes.


Alex sees the subtle shift in the track's freshness. The bushmen are intuitively slow. Now our steps match the shade of the sand where the lion stepped, showing a similar freshness.


James is robustly starting to look scarily comfortable. Here, in the wilderness of thorn and sand, I'm being initiated. Day after day. The lion's trail says you cannot stop. The lion's trail says commit. Commit to this path. Put everything out of your mind. Commit. Let it take you miles out of your comfort zone. Far beyond where the support vehicle can go. Commit. We walk on. Commit. Dying of thirst into the late afternoon. Commit. He could be going for another five hours from here. Commit. Persistence hunting has died. Commit. You won't raise the money to build a tracker academy. Commit. You can't build trust with leopards. Commit. Habituation doesn't work. Commit. You can't become a life coach from being a safari guide in Africa. Commit. Commit, Boyd. At every step of our trip, our commitment has been the key. 


The tracks become an endless meditation, and I move in that dreamlike state that has characterized this trip. I find myself on the front of the trail. The tracks pull me forward into the wide desert. I don't even see the tracks, I simply walk where the lion walked by some intuitive connection. Commit to the next step. Commit to your team. Commit to walking on whatever it takes. That's where we are now. I think of something I heard once in a bar. The Kalahari is a disease, someone said to me. Once you catch it, it'll always pull you back.


 Vista bobs like a metronome at the head of the trail. James looks more comfortable the worse it gets. Alex soldiers on. 


To commit. That's what I learned from a blood-drinking lion in the Kalahari. To refuse to stop. 


When we find him lying under the shade of a tree, he seems almost timid, thin and hungry. He is not magnificent, but he is my teacher.