Part 2_Episode 6_The last night in the Delta
Story Hunter, Part 2, Episode 6: The Last Night in the Delta 


On our last morning in the Delta, we wake well before dawn with a young elephant bull in the camp. I can hear him crunching on foliage and gassing the air just outside the circle of our tents. It's beautiful to lie in your bed and hear an elephant chomping nearby.


When I eventually exit my tent, the sky is a shock of stars. This place has my heart, and I have to wonder why I have amnesia. Every time I journey deep into the wild, it's like I'm baptized, some kind of Saint Francis of Assisi thing.


But like a sinner, I forget this Wild God, and I find myself pulled into the ways of the world. The fake world is an anesthetic. It makes me forget where I actually want to be.


Why does that keep happening? Is there something you know that lights you on fire that somehow you keep falling asleep to? I swear to myself I will return every year to the Delta for at least six weeks of camping out here in prayer and communion with the wild. I like to meet the person I am here. And I must remember that my work in some ways is to inhabit and remember wildness in an ever more domestic world. Yes, I have to speak and write and do coaching and do strategy and run retreats. That's the manifestation of a deeper work of remembering. The great secret art of my life is being in tune with wildness. To hold in myself the feeling of the wild as an act of embodiment and remembering. I need to continue to learn to let rivers run in my veins and feel the quiet contentment of a hungry solitude.


Maybe along the way, I will fall in love, and this time maybe I'll be ready inside in a different way. And in my dreams I will bring her here. I bet she knows the earth and wants to make friends with the trees. She can feel how old this place is. We will swim in the clear Delta water at midday, and she will put water lilies in her dark hair, and the sun will bake our bodies brown. At sunset, she will sit between my legs in the soft white Delta sand. She'll lean back against me, and I will smell her hair. It will be so quiet in the empty space that our breath will naturally fall into the same rhythm. Seems this place makes a romantic of me. 


We are tired this morning, having blasted through a casual 50 kilometers of walking in scorching heat in the last two days. At mid-morning, we meet back in the camp to begin to discuss preparation for the next phase of the trip. Camping gear, food supplies, logistics, fuel, water. There are many things to consider as we go 600 kilometers south into the thick sand and terrible heat of the Kalahari.


Alex has been liaising with a local professor who sends us a message that he has sent out word to local bushman communities so that the hunters and trackers can meet us at the edge of the desert at the town of Hukunsi. Slowly, our organic plans are coming together. It's a real make it up as you go along.


One thing is for sure, the conditions ahead will be dry and scorching. I find myself mentioning this multiple times as it plays on my mind. Heat stroke is real and quick in the Kalahari. People die of dehydration in the Kalahari. Tomorrow morning at dawn, we'll go to the town of Maun to resupply and then begin the drive south to meet with the Bushmen. Alex is planning things on the fly, drawing on his extensive network of fixes. In Maun, he has a friend who runs a horseback safari company lending us camping gear. He has managed to borrow a 4x4 vehicle. He's made friends with Anali, the woman who will connect us with the bushman. He has an old relationship with the professor. He is the don of tracking, having trained and placed trackers all over the safari and research industry from the Tracker Academy. Everyone owes Alex a favor, and now he's calling in those favors. I nickname him Don Lanzer, or the Great Don of Tracking. 


I'm excited to meet and learn from the bushman people. The professor says there is a chance we might be able to attend a trance dance, the all-night rhythmic dances where spirit is invoked through song and movement until a healing current of energy boils over.


I consider a lot, as I've been thinking about this trip, how the tracker and the shaman often intersect with each other as archetypal energies. Tracking is storytelling. Tracking is imagination. Tracking requires one to enter into the being of another, and this too is the realm of the shaman or healer. A shaman, though, is tracking and transforming energy. 


The bushman people are renowned trackers. The bushmen are of the land. The bushmen conjure energy to heal. How astounding! And soon we will be there with them. All of this I want to learn, and I feel ready and excited. In my dream that night, I see the face of an old woman by the fire. A bushman healer dances in staccato bursts in the desert sand. A scorpion potently escapes the fire down the edge of a log. There is a woman with long brown hair, I don't know, holding a baby on her hip. Then through the smoke I see the face of a Kudu.