Hunting and Gathering

Apparently, it's already beginning – the hasty blog entries due to time constraints, or laziness.

It's Saturday night, I've just made myself a somewhat delicious Middle-Eastern-inspired chicken dinner, and tomorrow at 7AM sharp I leave with the health team to go visit the settlements – I'll be gone from Sunday till Friday, and I'm sure I'll have more stories when I get back from that, so I'm going to have to give a highly selective account of my trip to Dqae Qare now.

Dqae Qare is about 14 years old. It was stocked with animals purchased from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), and has the following facilities: main lodge, with comfortable accommodations, kitchen, bar/lounge pavilion, bonfire circle for traditional dancing; far campsite, with plumbing and an “ablutions block” (bathroom area); two boreholes, both with solar-powered pumps, which provide water to the two accommodation sites and the two permanent water-holes/pans. There are several other natural pans that fill with water during the rainy season. While I was at Dqae Qare, for those who are interested, I saw the following:

porcupine

greater kudu

hartebeest (kongoni)

Southern oryx (gemsbok)

bush duiker

springbok

steinbuck

blue wildebeest (brindled gnu)

warthog

mongoose (not sure what species)

Cory bustard (I'm sure I'm misspelling that... sorry)

ostrich

vulture

many other birds – I really need a bird guide. There are so many beautiful birds, but I can't identify them.

The workshop was interesting, but mostly for the chance to spend time in the presence of the San elders, some of the few remaining people on earth that know first-hand the true gatherer-hunter way of life. (I've chosen to reverse the accepted order of “hunter-gatherer” to draw your attention to the fact that the gathering was actually much more important in terms of day-to-day caloric intake – and, the feminist in me screams, thus the women's contribution was equally important to the men's, despite the glamour of hunting. I hope to write a more complete entry on this topic later on.) They spoke only in Naro and another Bushman languages (I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the language they speak in Bere, but P came along to translate for those people), so I couldn't understand a word of it. However, I learned a lot about the way of the San people just by being around the elders, and we had the chance to go on some bush walks, which were enlightening.

The most exciting bush walk was with three of the old men. One was a man with eyes so small and engulfed by wrinkles that he seemed not to be able to see at all. His protruding cheekbones were draped with leathery brown skin that drew deep wrinkled creases down to the corners of his mouth, and he wore a bulging white-and-blue striped ski hat, despite the 40 degree weather. The second was a man with a wide, full mouth, large eyes that communicated a quiet patience and weariness, and rounded cheekbones that sunk to a very narrow jaw and chin. The third was a man rumoured to be able to transform into wild animals when in a trance; a sprightly guy who was a bit younger than the others, he had thin, electric-shocked dreadlocks and twinkling eyes. He wore a wide-brimmed green hat, and had a face that seemed to have been squashed vertically, the features compressed and sprightly, always amused. The three of them, along with W, one of the workshop leaders, and me, walked away from camp one morning before the workshop activities had started up. W explained that they were tracking a porcupine – they hadn't seen its tracks the previous afternoon, so it had gone by in the night.

I looked down at the path beneath my feet. Red sand, churned to chaos by the passing of many animals. Dents, holes, scratches, lines dragged along. If I looked closely, I could distinguish the prints of my Chacos, with their heavily-grooved Vibram soles. Pathetic! There were prints that might have been something dog-like, and prints that might have been something bird-like; but then again, they might not have been. And I certainly couldn't pick up the trail – a few prints here and there, but inevitably they ended, obscured by other footprints, wind, a change in direction, or a rocky patch in the path. “Here,” W said, pointing vaguely with his foot. “The porcupine.” I looked down. Smudges. Blots. Indistinguishable dents in the sand that I would never have thought were tracks at all.

“Oh, right,” I said, trying to sound confident.

“Sometimes you can see where its quills were dragging behind it,” he added, helpfully. In fact, I could see the thin scrape-marks of the quills much more clearly than the blobby prints (I never did end up being able to identify them), but I never would have noticed them if W hadn't pointed them out. “Let's go,” he said, pointing to the old men, who were already 50m ahead of us, rapidly disappearing into the bush. It took me a long moment of searching to see a print – a comparatively clear print – even when W was pointing it out to me. How could they follow the trail so fast? I trotted after them, amazed. When they lost the trail, they would split up in three different directions to search for it, invariably finding it within a few minutes, and then rejoin and keep tracking it. W explained as we went along that the porcupine was a very lazy animal – it would forage at night, and then return to its burrow, but sometimes it didn't make it back and then just went to sleep in the nearest convenient spot. The old men were hoping that it had gone to sleep somewhere easy-to-reach.

Eventually, after tracking it for nearly a kilometer, we reached the burrow. It was surprisingly large – there were several large entry-holes, with the burrow spread underneath them, covering an area of about 20 square meters, I'd guess. The old men set to with a purpose, crouching down to look in the holes, prodding long sticks down them, their bony limbs protruding hilariously from the porcupine's burrow as they tried to flush it out. They emerged covered in red sand, and conferred about what to do, then quickly decided to build a fire and smoke it out. Efficiently, one of them climbed down into a hole and started stuffing it with dry grasses, as another one searched for more fuel, and the third – the one who can transform into animals – broke a dead branch off of a nearby tree, to use as a club, and stationed himself near the hole that they thought the porcupine was most likely to emerge from.

Within a few minutes of setting the fire, the porcupine burst out of a different hole, obviously panicked, its long ungainly quills bouncing as it dashed into the bush. The men shouted and leaped up from their posts, and the man with the club yelled most excitedly of all, and immediately went sprinting off after the porcupine. I had no idea that such an old, frail-looking man could run so fast! But off he went, waving his branch, shouting at the porcupine as he pursued it through the bush. The other two watched. W burst out laughing, and I couldn't help joining him. Soon, the porcupine circled back around, the old man in hot pursuit, but before he could catch it the porcupine shot back down another hole into its burrow, and could not be persuaded to come out again, no matter how much they stomped or prodded, no matter how much they fed the fire. It was terrified, and determined to stay safe in its burrow. The old men waited – the one who had chased the porcupine stood poised above the hole it had emerged from before, branch cocked back and ready to club it in the head if it jumped out again. I was caught between excited amazement – they tracked it! We're going to GET it! - and bemused horror – they're going to club a wild animal to death, right in front of my eyes!

As it turned out, the porcupine wouldn't come out, and so they plugged up all the holes with dirt, stating an intention to come back for it later, as we had to get back to the workshop for the next session. “Won't it just dig itself out?” I asked W.

“No,” he replied. “The porcupine is a very lazy animal.”

Naturally the biologist in me does not accept the explanation that the porcupine is a lazy animal – clearly, it dug itself into the burrow, and should be capable of digging itself out, and to survive, it will have to dig out eventually – but on the other hand, the Bushmen have doubtless tracked and caught hundreds of porcupines. Who knows. They never went back for it, to my knowledge – probably because if they HAD caught it, they would have been poaching, and Dqae Qare would not have been very happy about it. (In fact, it's probably not a good idea for me to be posting this story, so let's pretend that they never intended to catch the porcupine, and it was just a demonstration of tracking prowess for the benefit of the dumb Canadian tourist...)

I also went walking with the old women, and helped them gather some kind of tree sap, as well as some small plum-like fruits. I tried them both – the tree sap sort of tasted like plastic, a not-unpleasant, mild, fatty taste. The skin of the fruits was unbearably bitter, but the flesh was good, though sour. They were so small, though, and had such big pits, that the skin was practically half of the fruit. Bummer.

OFF TO THE FIELD AGAIN!