Running With the Bushmen

Two hours into the hunt, my blister had burst and raw skin was grinding against my shoe.

But the blister was not the problem.

The decision was.

If I stopped, I might lose the Bushmen ahead of me. And with them, my place in something far older than my boyhood dream.

For most of my life, the idea of a persistence hunt had lived only in my imagination. Years earlier I had watched a documentary called The Great Dance. It showed San hunters following animals across the Kalahari Desert using skills that seemed almost magical.

A persistence hunter carries no bow and arrow. He follows an animal through the hottest hours of the day. Humans have a rare thermoregulatory advantage: we sweat to cool our bodies, while most animals must pant. In extreme heat, we can keep moving long after they are forced to stop.

It sounds simple.

It is like playing chess whilst running a marathon.

To recognise faint, almost invisible tracks in an ocean of other signs, across great distances, at pace, is one of the most demanding acts of applied intelligence our species has ever devised.

Anthropologists believe humans may have hunted this way for hundreds of thousands of years. It may be the oldest hunting method in human history.

But whenever I asked San trackers in the Kalahari about persistence hunting, they told me the same thing. The old hunters who knew how were gone.

Then something unexpected happened.

A small group of young San trackers came to me with an idea. They wanted to try.

They did not say they wanted to learn persistence hunting. They said they wanted to remember.

This kind of hunting has been part of their ancestors’ lives for millennia. It is woven into their culture and their stories. The hunt would happen on their land, under their rules, led entirely by them. We were guests.

They did not need help with tracking. They were already superb trackers.

What they needed was endurance.

A professional marathon runner helped them prepare, and soon the Bushmen were running 20 to 30 kilometres a day in the hot sun.

The atmosphere changed almost immediately. I cannot prove this, but I saw something wake up in them. They ran with the joy of people who had rediscovered something they had always loved.

The night before the hunt, we sat together around a fire.

Through a translator, I told them what I felt. This knowledge was never ours to give. We had brought them nothing new. We had only helped them find their way back to something that had always lived inside them.

I watched them watching me. A softness came over their faces.

It set up everything that followed.

Jon (not his real name) was the oldest in the group, the keeper of the old hunting culture. He guided the hunt’s traditions and taught the youngsters that the ritual mattered as much as the result.

That morning Jon braided a bangle from grass and slipped it onto my wrist.

You are part of this now.

Until then, the longest I had ever run was a half marathon in the cool hills of the KwaZulu-Natal midlands. This would be something else entirely. The Kalahari in summer regularly reaches the high 40s Celsius.

When the hunt began, the pace surprised me.

The Bushmen were not running at all.

They ambled across the dunes, talking softly to one another as they casually followed the tracks of a herd of kudu.

At first I thought we were wasting time. Then I realised they were waiting for something specific: the moment one animal separated from the herd. When one of them pointed to the tracks of a lone kudu moving away from the others, everything changed.

That was the one.

As the heat rose, we began to run.

The Bushmen moved with a smooth, relaxed stride that seemed almost effortless, floating over the sand while reading the kudu’s trail at the same time.

For a while my friend Boyd and I held our place near the front. I was running with them. Tracking with them.

Then we came to a fallen log, and without thinking I hopped over it. Two of the Bushmen stopped me at once, gesturing that I must go around next time.

I thought they were joking. Going around meant extra effort.

They were serious. You never jump over a log during a hunt. If you do, you give power to the kudu. One of them added, ‘Out of respect.’

I did not understand it then, and I do not fully understand it now. But I understood enough. This was a relationship. They were in conversation with the animal.

As the pace increased, Jon’s legs began to give in.

I saw him watch the younger men pull away from him. The man who remembered the most was left behind by his own body. His knowledge was intact. His will was intact. But the distance between what he knew and what he could still do had grown too great.

The pace lifted again. A couple of hours in, I noticed the kudu’s trail starting to zigzag, and wondered if it was tiring.

The sand was deep and loose. Every few steps my feet collapsed into hidden ground squirrel burrows, breaking my rhythm. Each stumble took something out of me.

Then my blister burst.

Pain shot through my toe, and that familiar voice of doubt arrived with it.

Maybe you are not tough enough for this. Maybe you do not deserve to be here.

The Bushmen kept moving steadily ahead. I do not know if they noticed me slipping back. It did not matter. The hunt was not going to wait for me.

The choice became clear. Keep running and see how bad it got. Or stop, fix the problem properly, and hope to catch up.

I had prepared for this. Before the run I had packed a small blister kit, and I had rehearsed this exact moment in my mind.

So I stopped.

Backpack off. Shoe off. Tape wrapped tight around the toe. Shoe back on. Pack closed.

Less than two minutes.

When I stood up, I expected to see nothing but empty woodland ahead.

Instead, the kudu was running straight toward me.

Behind it, maybe fifty metres back, the lead tracker was sprinting. His face was calm. His eyes never left the animal.

The kudu saw me and swerved. I turned and fell in beside the lead hunter, suddenly back at the front of the hunt.

The moment I stopped chasing, the hunt had come to me.

Forty minutes later, under the relentless sun, the kudu ran out of power. It slowed, then collapsed beneath a camel thorn tree.

The trackers approached it quietly and respectfully. One of them spoke softly in his own language before ending the hunt quickly and cleanly.

Then we knelt beside the animal, and each man took a handful of sand and let it fall slowly over the kudu’s body. A way of saying thank you. A way of asking the spirit to return to the earth it came from.

That night we sat around a fire beneath the enormous Kalahari sky. My friend James photographed a comet streaking overhead. The Bushmen said it was the spirit of the kudu travelling across the heavens.

Nobody said much.

Nobody needed to.

Somewhere inside men like Jon, a memory still lives. The kind carried in the body, not the mind.
The kind that skips generations.

But never disappears.

Alex van den Heever

Thank you, James Tyrrell, for the pics