Part 2_Episode 5_Pride




Story Hunter, part 2, episode 5, Pride. 
At sunrise, the track has cut the trail of a male lion padding through sandy soil. The light edges the eastern sky and a spotted hyena slinks by. Innocent works slowly on the tracks in the low light. Meticulously, he generates a clear vector through the long grass. Otto, James and I range over ground ahead of Innocent, seeking a pug mark on the line of vector that he is setting. This organic system occasionally seems to add speed to the tracking. 


My legs are quite stiff from the day before. The life of a tracker is characterised by hours and hours of walking. All the bloody wellness podcasts in the world couldn't make it as simple as the life of a hunter-gatherer. Hours of fasted walking. Humanity seems to be on a journey to ultimate complexity and optimization that will ultimately lead back to the original simplicity. The simplicity like this. Sunrise, brotherhood, wild places, clear mission. I think that's what we're all actually looking for. It's certainly what I'm looking for. 


Soon, the trackers are on the trail. The lion is moving in strange, erratic lines through the bush. He cuts left and right as if he doesn't know where he's going. Innocent decipheres the pattern. This lion, he says, doesn't seem to know this terrain, the way he's moving, and he's right. The tracks have the feeling of a being exploring. Lions tend to know their territories, often walking in crow flight straight lines between areas. This lion seems to be meandering in unusual lines. The mood and rhythm of the trail is completely different to the wild dogs. The day before we move in a more meticulous way on the tracks, steadily, we advance, track, track, track, predict, stroll forward. Confirmation. Track, yes, we're on it. 


There's a kind of alertness to lion tracking. The key to safety is to try to see the lion before it sees you. This will allow you to take the necessary evasive action. Lions, as you can imagine, do not like to be surprised. There is an added layer to the tension as we are visitors to this area, we don't know the temperament of the local lions. Some lions are timid and tend to run away. Others will come at you snarling and growling, and that's when you have to stand your ground. What this particular lion will do, we have no idea. Alert. 


I love watching my friend Alex in the bush. His use of energy is really efficient and he exudes confidence in his ability. He swings in solitary arcs away from the group. He's like a special forces scout that needs to work away from the unit. He'll gather information and then he returns. Sometimes he'll disappear and be lost for 15 or 20 minutes and then he appears unexpectedly out of the bush, often whistling to himself, completely at home. 


When I track, I can feel archetypal energies activating deep in my being. In me, I feel the urges that lie latent in the collective unconscious of humanity. Deep down, I feel my hunter. I feel my desire to compete and survive. I feel a million-year-old drive to find what I'm tracking. I feel how, in the wild, there is no margin for error. A mistake out here can mean instant death. And this proximity to real death is paradoxically full of life. All of this lives, latent and dormant in all humans, just under the surface of consciousness. All of this energy lurks deep down in modern life, a life full of safety and comfort that never conjures such energy to life. If the wild does have a gift to give, it is the activation of these archetypal energies. When these energies become conscious, they are experienced as more self, a fullness of being, a liveness itself. There is an infinity of fullness in the self of one human psyche. The challenge is not to add more to it, but rather to liberate what is already there from the unconscious to the conscious, and I personally find that tracking is liberating. The wild is liberating. The men I am with are liberating. There is more self out here in the wilderness. And maybe that's why all the mystics through all of time went to the wilderness - to drink from that well of self and liberate more of the unconscious energy to the conscious. 


After about three hours, we lose the lions into a huge grassy plain. Here we must predict the general direction. The track is immediately spread out and we wander through high grass. For a long time we move forward on faith and our best guess. The hours pass by as slowly we eliminate options for where the cats may have moved. Then suddenly, out the corner of my eye, I catch the sight of a single track. It's blown out edges, but we're back on. It's kind of like a break in the case. We reset our confidence. Here we go. From here the lions lead us across a broad plain. The plain is filled with Waterbuck and Lechwe, far off, an elephant mud baths in the distance. 


We've been following now for about four hours and immediately our water supply starts to run low. As I look around, the men start to get the look of a ragtag bunch with sweat- soaked shirts and bandanas and a collection of tracking sticks and packs. Wild bandits they are. In the thick grass of the floodplain, again, we lose the tracks. Tracking is never simple, and this is what makes it such a challenging and beautiful art form. The ground turns soggy underfoot and then we must remove our shoes. Soon we are wading through clear swamps in long reeds. Fuck it if we find a hippo in here we have a problem, says James. James is one of those morale boosting guys to have on an adventure, for as the situation gets more intense he starts to enjoy himself more. He turns to me in waist deep water, surrounded by water lilies and the real possibility of a crocodile. I love this, he says with a smile. 


On the far side of the swamp, we scout an island full of cool shade trees and not a track to be seen. The tracks are now truly lost. Five hours are following and now the trail cannot be found. Yesterday we were high fiving the success of the dogs. Today the trail has run dry. Tracking will make a tracker philosophical. There are just some trails that are not to end in success. Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you. My Garmin watch says we've been out moving across the land for about 15 kilometres. My spirit have no metric to measure them, but I can tell you that there is a gentle joy in my heart. These long days in a wild place with superb trackers are magical. 


We walk a long way to where we left our vehicle before dawn, now, in blazing midday morning heat. I chat to Otto, who is of San-Bushman descent, and he tells me of the Bushman people and their traditions. In a few days we will leave the beauty of the Okavango Delta and drive south into the dry heat of the central Kalahari to be with the Bushman people. Otto tells me stories of his homeland south of Ghanzi. It's so hot down there, he says. One time I saw a lizard running across the road die from the heat. 


I feel like when we leave the delta the holiday will be over and an adventure of immense endurance would have begun. I ask Otto about the famous trance dances of the Bushman people. The dances ended down from family to family. He says some Bushmen transform into lions when they dance. 


I can feel there's a hint of mystery in his words. There's a world I do not yet understand. As we drive back to the camp, I think of how the world is full of worlds - the world of a tracker, the world of the banker, the world of an artist, the world of a local, the world of an immigrant, the world of an elephant, the world of a whale. No world is the same. Your world, my world. Every world is made by a single point of consciousness. This may be the great joke of God. There is no world except your world. The agency this leaves you with, is the remarkable truth that the world is what you believe it to be. The world is not as it is. It is as you are. Today, in my world, lions move across the wilderness of the south. I'm with my brothers, I'm alive. I know this word alive comes out of my mouth a lot in these episodes, and that's because I've come to believe that the mission and the purpose is to simply be fully alive. Jim Deathmore, the founder of Conscious Leadership Group, asks new clients this question when he begins to coach them, and I ask you now what are you willing to do to risk to be fully alive? 


In the late afternoon, Alex makes us return to the last tracks and start again. His mastery is his relentless commitment. So many people would have given up, but Alex has not. He has lain in his bunk back at camp, running mental models of the terrain. We check a new arc of ground we didn't make it to in the morning. Like the wild dogs the day before, the lions have turned 90 degrees back on themselves to avoid a pool of water.  Innocent cuts the track again. Now we follow till dusk and we find the lions sleeping under a huge knobthorn tree. I understand their fatigue, having walked their path through the wild all day long. Every step they have taken I have taken. There is an intimacy to tracking. To walk in an animal's footsteps all day is to know that animal on a different level. I'm bone tired. I'm elated. I have not yet been to a trance dance, but maybe the transformation into a lion has begun.