The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
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distinguish one track from the next. ‘This morning,’ I said hesitatingly, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to take you away from your wife. I know you’ve been away in Baraka …’
Benjamin looked at me blankly, then away, stifling a grin. ‘That’, he said, ‘was not my wife.’ He turned quickly and walked on.
A moment later he stopped short, crouched and turned his head, motioning for us to get down too. ‘See’, he whispered, pointing ahead. Through a gap in the thicket I saw a small antelope head turn in our direction for a brief second – all flickering ears, limpid, deep brown eyes and little, straight horns – then, reassured that there was no danger, it dipped to graze again. It was a steenbok, a notoriously shy, alert, nervous antelope and we were very close, not twenty yards away.
Xau crept noiselessly up to Benjamin and, using a fluent, silent language of the hands, enquired what he should do. Benjamin replied in the same way, the fingers of one hand making precise gestures against the palm of the other, and Xau crawled off to the left, making a slight noise that caused the antelope to look his way – away from us.
Slowly, so slowly it almost hurt to watch, Benjamin reached back into his shoulder bag for the bow and quiver. Unscrewing the quiver’s cap of stiffened hide he noiselessly shook out an arrow – sticky and dark below its small steel tip with a poison made from mashed beetle larvae mixed with saliva. He fitted the arrow to his bow string and rose to a half-standing position. One swift movement lifted the bow and poised the arrow to eye level. Leaning forward from the hips, Benjamin looked directly down the shaft at the antelope, who still grazed blithe and unaware. Up arced the arrow, soundlessly covering the intervening yards between us and the steenbok to hiss into the grass behind it. The head and neck flew up, making – for a brief second – a frozen, alarmed silhouette. Then it took off, disappearing into the trees in three great bounds. Benjamin shrugged, smiling a little sheepishly, and went to retrieve his arrow.
Much later, as the morning heated up towards humid noon, we sighted a group of red hartebeest in a glade of sour plum trees. Large, the size of horses, they are one of Africa’s oddest-looking antelope. Their extremely narrow faces taper to barely two inches across at the muzzle. Their eyes stick out and their short horns jut forward in a strange, double-kink. At Benjamin’s whispered order, we crouched down a second time. ‘They’ll come this way. We must wait.’ Next to us, a large, talcum-powder white mushroom was growing from a red termite mound. Benjamin reached out and picked it, breaking the white flesh into long sections which he silently offered us. They tasted of lightly smoked cheese, and we munched for a minute or two in happy silence. Then the hunters’ faces registered sudden alarm, and with curt gestures they told us to lie flat. Hoofbeats, growing louder. I raised my head and saw the heads and horns of two hartebeest rising and dipping at a canter straight down the trail on which we were crouched.
The first animal burst through the grasses right on top of us and, seeing us, plunged to a halt and reared. Benjamin leapt to his feet and let fly his arrow. There was a blur of hooves, red-coloured hide and dust; the beasts wheeled and were gone. ‘Did you hit it?’ I was shouting with excitement. Benjamin leant down in the grass and came up with the arrow in his hand. He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. Xau let fly a torrent of abuse. Laughing, Benjamin translated: ‘He says I am shit!’
By now the heat was mounting – the animals would start lying up in the shade. To continue hunting would probably be fruitless. Benjamin turned us north, back to Makuri. After a few minutes, I asked, ‘So how often do you manage a kill?’
He sighed. ‘A big animal, with bows and arrows like this? Maybe one time in a month.’
‘So what do you live on the rest of the time?’
‘Roots, berries, wild fruits …’ Benjamin’s voice trailed off, then became suddenly vehement. ‘We need money – not just for food. There are many problems here, man, many. There are cattle herders from Botswana – the Herero – coming in here, and nothing to stop them because we have no power, no money. And the young people going to the town to drink and not learning the skills because they say that this life is finished. Yes, we need money.’ He paused. ‘Maybe people like you – tourists – might come here and see our life. There is money in this, I think?’
So, as we walked, we hatched a plan. When I returned to Windhoek and after that to London, I would try to find a safari company that would be prepared to work with the Ju’/Hoansi, bringing clients to experience what we had just experienced – but who would offer the Bushmen a share of the profits rather than just pay them to work as trackers and guides. I knew a company called Footprints, in Windhoek, who sometimes took people up to this region – Benjamin had himself mentioned them earlier, as if planting the seed in my mind. When I got back to the city I would go and talk to them, I promised. Then, for the contact in Britain, I thought of Safari Drive, the company who had lent us the vehicle. They had the contacts, moved in the circles that could attract moneyed clients, and were good people. Walking back along the trail I agreed with Benjamin that next summer – the Namibian winter – we would try and set up a prototype trip, get Safari Drive to organise some clients from England, and together we concocted a happy future.
Back at Makuri, we found a big white Toyota Land Cruiser parked outside the circle of huts. Three white people – a young, dark-haired man and two women in their later thirties – stood talking to old man /Kaece. They looked irritated. As we walked up the narrow trail in the now stifling late-morning heat, the young white man turned, saw us and said half-angrily, half-jokingly, in an accent that sounded American or Canadian: ‘Benjamin! Where the fuck have you been? We’ve been looking for you for hours. Get in the car!’
Without a word Benjamin left us, went off to his hut, came out with a small holdall, and got into the car where the three whites were now waiting, gunning the engine impatiently. They hadn’t introduced themselves, but I guessed that they must be from Baraka – the Nyae Nyae Farmer’s Co-operative field headquarters where Benjamin had told us he worked. A few minutes later they were gone, Benjamin giving us a quick wave from the back seat as the Land Cruiser disappeared round a bend in the rutted track.
Immediately old man /Kaece and young Xau turned on us and began demanding money, thrusting out their hands and jutting their chins aggressively. The two men – one old, one young – shared a clear family resemblance: the same sharp neat nose, the same eyes that were half mischievous, half soulful. Benjamin, though taller, had also shared this look. Were they all related? I reached into the pocket of my shorts, took out some notes and counted out into the old man’s hand the price I had agreed with Benjamin the evening before – ten Namibian dollars for the night’s camping, ten for Xau and ten for Benjamin. I hoped Xau would give Benjamin his share.
Placated, the younger man drifted back to his hut, but /Kaece took my arm and led me to his hut where his wife sat, scraping the flesh from the inside of a tortoise shell. Seeing us, she rose, a tiny frail figure, with an old duk* round her head, several strings of white ostrich-eggshell beads around her wattled old neck, and a beaded steenbok skin knotted at one shoulder. A small dark nipple peeked cheekily out of a tear in the hide. She took off one of the necklaces and offered it to Kristin, while /Kaece said ‘Twenty, twenty’, in Afrikaans. A few minutes later we had bought not only the necklace, but the tortoise shell, a beautiful hunting bow with a set of poison arrows in a quiver, a digging stick, a skin bag to put game in, two sticks for making fire, and a short stabbing spear. A small crowd gathered, each with something to sell. Unable to resist, we saw our roll of notes shrink and vanish. When there was no money left, the people lost interest and melted away among the huts again, leaving us alone.
Standing there with all our newly-bought artifacts, Kristin and I felt suddenly self-conscious, glutted, almost ashamed. We turned and began the walk back to camp. The hunt had been the true fulfilment of a dream. Benjamin had made us feel accepted, respected, welcome. Yet his sudden disappearance and our subsequent fleecing had revealed, with brutal honesty, what we actually represented here: money.
We lay the rest of the day under the great baobab, watching the heavy, sweet-smelling blossoms glide earthward from the high, misshapen