ourselves no longer, but picked up our day-packs, water bottles and cameras and went to find the nyore (village), which we knew lay a half-mile or so through the thick scrub.
We found Makuri village still sleeping. As we entered the circle of tiny, beehive huts, only the nyore’s pack of weaselly, starveling dogs were up to greet our arrival. They rushed towards us, barking. But despite the noise, no one appeared from the huts. We stood sheepishly in the centre of the village, throwing small stones at the dogs to keep them off. It was long past dawn now. The first heat was in the sun. Already some animals would be slinking into shady cover for the day. Were we too late? Had the hunters forgotten us and left already?
The rib-thin dogs began to fight among themselves – one had found a bloody section of tortoise-shell and the others wanted it. They chased and fought around the huts, yapping louder and louder until at last a flap in the low doorway of one of the little huts opened, and a wrinkled face appeared. Old man /Kaece crawled out, straightened stiffly, shouted at the animals to shut up and threw a tin mug at the nearest. He stretched luxuriously, raising his hands above his head, sticking out his hard belly and closing his eyes with the bliss of it. He yawned, then looked our way and, as if noticing us for the first time, nodded to us while energetically scratching his balls inside his xai and hawking up a great gob of phlegm. He spat it out, leant forward to examine the colour, and nodded, as if pleased with what he saw. Then, his morning ritual done, he shuffled over to the next-door hut and banged on the side.
There was a muffled noise from within and Benjamin’s head appeared, his sharp, handsome features bleared with sleep and, I realised later when near enough to smell his breath, with liquor. He crawled out, his good, store-bought clothes rumpled from being slept in. He yawned, looked at us vaguely, as if surprised to find us there. Then a pretty young woman with seductive almond eyes, and an ostrich-eggshell necklace draped over her breasts, ducked out of the opening in the beehive hut behind him, saw us, giggled, and darted away out of sight. Benjamin watched her go, stretching his lower back and obviously making an effort to collect his thoughts.
He nodded at us, looking irritated: ‘OK, yes. I’ll be with you now, now.’ He went to a tree at the edge of the huts and hidden by the thick trunk, urinated in a loud, splashing stream before returning and ducking back inside the hut’s low doorway to reappear a few moments later with his hunting kit. A bow of light-coloured wood, a quiver of arrows made from a hollowed-out root, a digging stick and a short spear, all hanging conveniently over his right shoulder in a bag made from a whole steenbok skin. He went over to another hut, banged on it, and roused a smaller, even slighter-built young man, similarly bleary and clad in T-shirt, jeans and running shoes. This, said Benjamin, was his co-hunter Xau; he turned to the smaller man and said something in Ju/’Hoansi, then looked back at us: ‘Let’s go.’
A moment later we were trotting awkwardly behind the two fit, fleet men, out of the village and into the tall grasses. Despite having just been roused from drunken sleep, they moved fast and fluidly, in deceptively small steps, seeming almost to glide above the ground, so smooth was their stride. Benjamin and Xau cast what seemed only the most cursory glances at the ground as they walked. Every few yards we would come upon a narrow track of red or yellow dust criss-crossed with hoof and paw prints. ‘See,’ Benjamin stopped and pointed. ‘That steenbok, we want him.’ Following his gaze I nodded sagely, though I couldn’t 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
