In northwest British Columbia, a year or so after graduating from college, I was hired as one of the first park rangers in the Spatsizi Wilderness, a roadless tract of two million acres in the remote reaches of the Cassiar Mountains. The job description was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two long seasons, our ranger team—myself and one other, Al Poulsen, a six-foot-four vegetarian who grazed through meals and could conjure golden eagles out of the wild—encountered perhaps a dozen visitors. Wilderness assessment was a license to explore the park at will, tracking game and mapping the horse trails of outfitters, describing routes up mountains and down rivers, recording what we could of the movements of large populations of caribou and sheep, mountain goats, grizzly bears, and wolves.

 

In the course of these wanderings, we came upon an old native gravesite on an open bench overlooking Laslui Lake, near the headwaters of the Stikine River. The wooden tombstone read, simply, “Love Old Man Antoine died 1926.” Curious about the grave, I crossed the lake to the mouth of Hotleskwa Creek, where the Collingwood brothers, the outfitters for the Spatsizi, had established a spike camp. There I found Alex Jack, an old Gitksan man who had lived in the mountains most of his life. His native name was Atehena, “he who walks leaving no tracks.” Not only did Alex know of the grave, his own brother-in-law had laid the body to rest in it. Old Man Antoine, it turned out, was a legendary shaman, crippled from birth but possessed of the gift of clairvoyance. Alex had walked overland from his home at Bear Lake in the Skeena, 150 miles to the south, in order to meet Antoine, only to arrive on the day of his death.

 

Intrigued by this link between a living elder, raised in seasonally nomadic encampments, totally dependent on the hunt, and a shaman born in the previous century who read the future in stones cast into water held in baskets woven from roots, I left my job as a park ranger and went to work with Alex. As we wrangled horses, repaired fences, guided the odd hunter in search of moose or goat, I would ask him to tell me the stories of the old days, the myths of his people and his land. He happily told tales of his youth, of the hunting forays that had brought meat to the village and of the winter trading runs by dogsled to the coast, but he never said a word about the legends.

 

Long after I had given up on hearing the origin myths, I went out one morning to salvage a moose carcass abandoned by a trophy hunter. When I returned after a long day with a canoe full of meat, Alex was waiting for me. As we walked back across the meadow with our loads, he said very quietly that he remembered a story and invited me to drop by his tent later in the evening. To this day I do not know whether I had achieved a certain level of trust with Alex, or whether I had finally inquired about the stories in the correct manner, or whether the gift of meat had some greater significance. But that night I began to record a long series of creator tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, the trickster/transformer of Gitksan lore.

 

They were almost all whimsical stories of moral gratitude played out against and within the backdrop of nature. We-gyet, for example, eager to eat, swims beneath a gathering of swans and greedily grabs their legs, only to be dragged from the water as the flock rises in response, soaring toward the sun. Stranded in the sky, he lets go and comes crashing back to the Earth, the force of the impact imbedding him in granite. A lynx comes by, and We-gyet, using his charm and guile, persuades the cat to lick away the rock. We-gyet rewards his saviour with the tufts of hair that have since that time decorated the ears of every lynx.

 

To kill a grizzly, We-gyet takes advantage of the creature’s pride. Moving with the speed of the wind, he flies past a berry patch, astonishing the bear with his grace and movements. The grizzly looks up, only to see We-gyet race by once more. After three passes, We-gyet stops, breathlessly approaches his prey, and collapses with laughter as he points disparagingly at the bear’s testicles. “No wonder you can’t run,” he comments, “with those things dangling between your legs. I cut mine off years ago. See?” We-gyet has stained his groin with the blood-red sap of a willow. The grizzly, eager to remain the dominant creature in the forest, slices off his genitals and promptly bleeds to death.

 

Animals large and small featured in Alex’s tales. A hunting party away from home for many days grows tired, the young boys restless and bored. To pass the time, they cast a squirrel into their fire, a cruel act repeated again and again until the creature, unable to escape, disappears in the flames. The following morning, the hunters awake to find themselves camped in a circle at the base of an enormous cylinder of rock that reaches to the heavens, bluffs on all sides, no escape. Perplexed, a warrior tosses a pack dog into the fire, and to his surprise the animal appears at the top of the rock face. One by one, each hunter slips into the flames and materializes alongside the dog, thus miraculously escaping the trap. They head for home, but when they enter their village and approach their loved ones, no one sees them. They reach out and try to touch their wives and mothers. Their hands pass through the bodies like air. They are all dead, ghosts empty of will, punished for the crime of having, as Alex put it, “suffered that small squirrel.”

 

Darkness is the time for stories, and in the glow of a kerosene lamp, with wind and rain falling upon the canvas, the tent that first night took on the warmth of a womb. Alex’s words themselves had a certain magic, a power to influence not only the listener but the land itself. When he told a story, he did not, as we might, recount an anecdote, which by definition is a literary device, an abstraction, the condensation of a memory extracted from the stream of experience, a recollection of facts strung together with words. Alex actually lived the story again and again, returning in body and soul, in physical gesture and nuance, to the very place and time of its origin. At first I thought this merely charming, and only after many years of listening, often to the same account told in the same way time and again, did I understand the significance of what he was sharing.

 

Alex did not come from a tradition of literacy. He had never learned to read or write with any degree of fluency. For most of his adult life, he had been a seasonally nomadic hunter; his very vocabulary was inspired by the sounds of the wild. For him, the sweeping flight of a hawk was the cursive hand of nature, a script written on the wind. As surely as we can hear the voices of characters as we read the pages of a novel, so Alex could hear in his mind the voices of animals, creatures that he both revered and hunted. Their meat kept him alive. Their skins could be worked into leather for moccasins and clothes, packsacks and the traces of his sled, the scabbard for his 30.06 rifle. Their blood could be cooked, the marrow of their bones sucked out and fed as a delicacy to children.

 

When Alex told a story, he did so in such a way that the listener actually witnessed and experienced the essence of the tale, entering the narrative and becoming transfixed by all the syllables of nature. Every telling was a moment of renewal, a chance to engage through repetition in the circular dance of the universe.

 

Alex never spoke ill of the wind or the cold. When hunting, he never referred to the prey by name until after the kill; then he spoke directly to the animal with praise and respect, admiring its strength and cleverness. His grandmother was Cree, people of the medicine power, who believe that language was given to humans by the animals. His mother was Carrier. In 1924, two years before Alex left Bear Lake to walk overland to the Stikine, an elder from the Bulkley Valley, quite possibly one of Alex’s relatives, revealed something of the Carrier world to the anthropologist Diamond Jenness:

 

 

I did indeed write down Alex’s tales, transcriptions of dozens of hours of conversations recorded intermittently over 25 years, committed to paper a few years before his death. Only after I finished did I realize that in a sense I had committed a form of violence, a transgression that bordered on betrayal. Extracted from the theatre of his telling, the landscape of his memory, the sensate land, and the sibilant tones of the wild, the stories lost much of their meaning and power. Transposed into two dimensions by ink and paper, trapped on the page, they seemed childlike in their simplicity, even clumsy in their rhetoric.

 

But, of course, these stories were not meant to be recorded. They were born of the land and had their origins in another reality. Some time after I first learned of We-gyet from Alex, I asked him how long it took to tell the cycle of tales. He replied that he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they had strapped on their snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, and walked the length of Bear Lake, a distance of 20 miles, telling the story as they went along. They reached the far end, turned, and walked all the way back home, and the story, Alex recalled, “wasn’t halfway done.”

 

In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded. For Alex and his father, this sense of place, this topography of the spirit, at one time informed every aspect of their existence. When at the turn of the century a Catholic missionary arrived at their village at Bear Lake, Alex’s father was completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. He could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing, and all the things that made life worth living in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He could not conceive of a world without wild things.

 

Alex lived for more than 90 years; his wife Madeleine reached 103, passing away a few seasons before Alex followed her to the grave. A year before he died, Alex gave me a small gift, a tool carved from caribou bone. Smooth as marble, though stained from years of use, it fit perfectly in my hand, the rounded and slightly serrated spoon-like tip protruding neatly from between finger and thumb. I had no idea what it might have been used for. Alex laughed. He had carved it more than 80 years before, following the lead of his father. It was a specialized instrument, used to skin out the eyelids of wolves. Only later did I realize that the eyelids in question were my own, and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was, in his own way, saying good-bye.

A year or two after Alex passed away, I found myself one afternoon in the small Andean town of Chincheros just outside of Cuzco, sitting on a rock throne carved from granite. At my back was the sacred mountain Antakillqa, lost in dark clouds yet illuminated in a mysterious way by a rainbow that arched across its flank. Below me, the terraces of Chincheros fell away to an emerald plain, the floor of an ancient seabed, beyond which rose the ridges of the distant Vilcabamba, the last redoubt of the Inca, a landscape of holy shrines and lost dreams where Tupac Amarú waged war and the spirit of the Sun still ruled for 50 years after the Conquest. Two young boys played soccer on the village green, a plaza where once Topa Inca Yupanqui, second of the great Inca rulers, reviewed his troops. On the very stone where I rested, he no doubt had stood; this village of adobe and whitewashed homes, this warren of cobblestones, mud, and grass, had been built upon the ruins of his summer palace.

 

For 400 years the Catholic Church, perched at the height of the ruins overlooking the market square, had dominated the site. A beautiful sanctuary, it bears today none of the scars of the Conquest. It is a place of worship that belongs to the people, and there are no echoes of tyranny. Within its soaring vault, in a space illuminated by candles and the light of pale Andean skies, I once stood at the altar, a newborn child in my arms, a boy swaddled in white linen. An itinerant priest dripped holy water onto his forehead and spoke words of blessing that brought the infant into the realm of the saved. After the baptism there was a celebration, and the child’s parents, my new compadres, toasted every hopeful possibility. I too made promises, which in the ensuing years I attempted to fulfill. I had no illusions about the economic foundation of the bond. From me, my compadres hoped to secure support: in time, money for my godchild’s education, perhaps the odd gift, a cow for the family, a measure of security in an uncertain nation. From them I wanted nothing but the chance to know their world, an asset far more valuable than anything I could offer.

 

This pact, never spoken about and never forgotten, was in its own way a perfect reflection of the Andes, where the foundation of all life, both today and in the time of the Inca, has always been reciprocity. One sees it in the fields, when men come together and work in teams, moving between rows of fava beans and potatoes, season to season, a day for a day, planting, hoeing, weeding, mounding, harvesting. There is a spiritual exchange in the morning when the first of a family to awake salutes the sun, and again at night when a father whispers prayers of thanksgiving and lights a candle before greeting his family. Every offering is a gift: blossoms scattered onto fertile fields, the blessing of the children and tools at the end of each day, coca leaves presented to Pachamama at any given moment. When people meet on a trail, they pause and exchange k’intus of coca, three perfect leaves aligned to form a cross. Turning to face the nearest apu, or mountain spirit, they bring the leaves to the mouth and blow softly, a ritual invocation that sends the essence of the plant back to the earth, the community, the sacred places, and the souls of the ancestors. The exchange of leaves is a social gesture, a way of acknowledging a human connection. But the blowing of the phukuy, as it is called, is an act of spiritual reciprocity. In giving selflessly to the earth, the individual ensures that in time the energy of the coca will return full circle, as surely as rain falling on a field will inevitably be reborn as a cloud.

 

Almost 20 years after first visiting Chincheros, I returned to participate in an astonishing ritual, the mujonimiento, the annual running of the boundaries. Since the time of the Inca, the town has been divided into three ayullus, or communities, the most traditional of which is Cuper, the home of my compadres and, to my mind, the most beautiful, for its lands encompass Antakillqa and all the soaring ridges that separate Chincheros from the sacred valley of the Urubamba. Within Cuper are four hamlets, and once each year, at the height of the rainy season, the entire male population, save those elders physically incapable of the feat, runs the boundaries of their respective communities. It is a race but also a pilgrimage, for the frontiers are marked by mounds of earth, holy sites where prayers are uttered and ritual gestures lay claim to the land. The distance traveled by the members of each hamlet varies. The track I was to follow, that of Pucamarca, covers 15 miles, but the route crosses two Andean ridges, dropping a thousand feet from the plaza of Chincheros to the base of Antakillqa, then ascending 3,000 feet to a summit spur before descending to the valley on the far side, only to climb once more to reach the grasslands of the high puna and the long trail home.

 

At the head of each contingent would dart the waylaka, the strongest and fleetest of the youths, transformed for the day from male to female. Dressed in heavy woolen skirts and a cloak of indigo, wearing a woman’s hat and delicate lace, the waylaka would fly up the ridges, white banner in hand. At every boundary marker the transvestite must dance, a rhythmic turn that like a vortex draws to the peaks the energy of the women left behind in the villages far below. Each of the four hamlets of Cuper has its own trajectory, just as each of the three ayullus has its own land to traverse. By the end of the day, all of Chincheros would be reclaimed: the rich plains and verdant fields of Ayullupunqu; the lakes, waterfalls, mountains, and cliffs of Cuper; the gorges of Yanacona, where wild things thrive and rushing streams carry away the rains to the Urubamba. Adversaries would have been fought, spirits invoked, a landscape defined, and the future secured.

 

This much I knew as I approached the plaza on the morning of the event. Before dawn, the blowing of the conch shells had awoken the town, and the waylakas, once dressed, had walked from house to house saluting the various authorities: the curaca and alcalde; the officers of the church; and the embarados, those charged with the preservation of tradition. At each threshold, coca had been exchanged, fermented maize chicha imbibed, and a cross of flowers hung in reverence above the doorway. For two hours the procession had moved from door to door, musicians in tow, until it encompassed all of the community and drew everyone in celebration to the plaza, where women waited, food in hand: baskets of potatoes and spicy piquante, flasks of chicha, and steaming plates of vegetables. There I lingered, with gifts of coca for all. At my side was my godson, Armando. A grown man now, father of an infant girl, he had been a tailor but worked now in the markets of Cuzco, delivering sacks of potatoes on a tricycle rented from a cousin. He had returned to Chincheros to be with me for the day.

 

What I could never have anticipated was the excitement and the rush of adrenaline, the sensation of imminent flight as the entire assembly of men, prompted by some unspoken signal, began to surge toward the end of the plaza. With a shout, the waylaka sprang down through the ruins, carrying with him more than a hundred runners and dozens of young boys who scattered across the slopes that funneled downward toward a narrow dirt track. The trail fell away through a copse of eucalyptus and passed along the banks of a creek that dropped to the valley floor. A mile or two on, the waylaka paused for an instant, took measure of the men, caught his breath, and was off, dashing through thickets of buddleia and polylepis as the rest of us scrambled to keep sight of his white banner. Crossing the creek draw, we moved up the face of Antakillqa. Here at last the pace slowed to something less than a full run. Still, the men leaned into the slope with an intensity and determination unlike anything I had ever known. Less than two hours after leaving the village, we reached the summit ridge, a climb of several thousand feet.

 

There we paused, as the waylaka planted his banner atop a mujon, a tall mound of dirt, the first of the border markers. The authorities added their ceremonial staffs, and as the men piled on dirt to augment the size of the mujon, Don Jeronimo, the curaca, sang rich invocations that broke into a cheer for the well-being of the entire community. By this point the runners were as restless as racehorses, frantic to move. A salutation, a prayer, a generous farewell to those of Cuper Pueblo (another of the hamlets) who would track north, and we of Pucamarca were off, heading east across the back side of the mountain to a second mujon located on a dramatic promontory overlooking all of the Urubamba. Beyond the hamlets and farms of the sacred valley, clouds swirled across the flanks of even higher mountains as great shafts of sunlight fell upon the river and the fields far below.

 

We pounded on across the back side of the mountain and then straight down at a full run through dense tufts of ichu grass and meadows of lupine and rue. Another mujon, more prayers, handfuls of coca all around, blessings and shouts, and a mad dash off the mountain to the valley floor, where, mercifully, we older men rested for a few minutes in the courtyard of a farmstead owned by a beautiful elderly woman who greeted us with a great ceramic urn of frothy chicha. One of the authorities withdrew from his pocket a sheet of paper listing the names of the men and began to take attendance. Participation in the mujonimiento is obligatory, and those who fail to appear must pay a fine to the community. As the names were called, I glanced up and was stunned to see the waylaka, silhouetted on the skyline hundreds of feet above us, banner in hand, moving on.

 

So the day went. The rains began in early afternoon and the winds blew fiercely by four. By then nothing mattered but the energy of the group, the trail at our feet, and the distant slope of yet another ridge to climb. Warmed by alcohol and coca leaves, the runners fell into reverie, a curious state of joy and release, almost like a trance.

 

Darkness was upon us as we rushed down the final canyon on a broad muddy track where the water ran together like mercury and disappeared beneath the stones. Approaching the valley floor and the hamlet of Cuper Alto, where women and children waited, the rain-soaked runners closed ranks behind the waylaka to emerge from the mountains as a single force, an entire community that had affirmed through ritual its sense of place and belonging. In making the sacrifice, the men had reclaimed a birthright and rendered sacred a homeland. Once reunited with their families, they drank and sang, toasting their good fortune as the women served great steaming bowls of soup from iron cauldrons. And, of course, late into the night the waylakas danced.

Both of these accounts reveal the role that ritual plays in forging the bonds of memory that define a people’s sense of place and belonging. Each indicates as well the importance of embracing metaphor as we attempt to understand traditional relationships to land, history, community, and the spirit realm. Ultimately, this is our great challenge. How do we, who have grown so distant from the soil and the mystic threads of recollection that gave rise to our being, explain the wonder of those peoples who still engage the land? Most of our popular explanations come up short. Many still invoke Rousseau, implying that indigenous peoples are somehow by nature closer to the land than we can possibly be, an idea not only silly, but racist in its simplicity. Others recall Thoreau, as if to suggest that indigenous peoples are more conscious and contemplative about their place in nature than those of us born into the industrial world.

 

Indigenous peoples, in truth, are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. Life in the malarial swamps of New Guinea, the chill winds of Tibet, the white heat of the Sahara, leaves little room for sentiment. Nostalgia is not a trait commonly associated with the Inuit. Nomadic hunters and gatherers in Borneo have no conscious sense of stewardship for mountain forests that they lack the technical capacity to destroy. What these cultures have done, however, is to forge through time and ritual a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land but also on far more subtle intuition—the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by human consciousness. Mountains, rivers, and forests are not perceived as inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies the land is alive, a dynamic force to be embraced and transformed by the human imagination. Here lies the essence of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the natural world.

 

Around ten thousand years ago, the Neolithic revolution transformed human destiny; with agriculture came surplus, specialization, hierarchy, and a religious worldview that displaced the poetry of the shaman with the prose of the institutional priesthood. Three hundred years ago at the dawn of the industrial age, the spirit of the Enlightenment liberated the individual from the constraints of community. This was an even more profound innovation, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom. Still, in much of the world, neither innovation took hold. In Australia, the Aboriginal peoples neither freed the individual nor succumbed to the cult of progress. For thousands of years they traveled lightly on the land. To be sure, they set fire to grasslands and forest, killed what game they could. But for the most part, their impact on their environment was nominal. Why did this happen? Why were they exempt from the impulses to improve on the wild that propelled our ancestors? An explanation may be found in the fundamental beliefs and convictions that defined their existence.

 

The Europeans who colonized Australia were unprepared for the sophistication of the place and its inhabitants, incapable of embracing its wonder. They had no understanding of the challenges of the desert and little sensitivity to the achievements of Aboriginal peoples who for over 60,000 years had thrived as nomads, wanderers on a pristine continent. In all that time the desire to improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, had never touched them. The Aborigines accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole, the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when earth and sky separated and the original Ancestor brought into being all the primordial Ancestors who, through their thoughts, dreams, and journeys, sang the world into existence.

 

The Ancestors walked as they sang, and when it was time to stop, they slept. In their dreams they conceived the events of the following day, points of creation that fused one into another until every creature, every stream and stone, all time and space, became part of the whole, the divine manifestation of the one great seminal impulse. When they grew exhausted from their labours, they retired into the earth, sky, clouds, rivers, lakes, plants, and animals of an island continent that resonates with their memory. The paths taken by the Ancestors have never been forgotten. They are the Songlines, precise itineraries followed even today as the people travel across the template of the physical world.

 

As the Aborigines track the Songlines and chant the stories of the first dawning, they become part of the Ancestors and enter the Dreamtime, which is neither a dream nor a measure of the passage of time. It is the very realm of the Ancestors, a parallel universe where the ordinary laws of time, space, and motion do not apply, where past, future, and present merge into one. It is a place that Europeans can approximate only in sleep, and thus it became known to the early English settlers as the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. But the term is misleading. A dream by Western definition is a state of consciousness divorced from the real world. The Dreamtime, by contrast, is the real world, or at least one of two realities experienced in the daily lives of the Aborigines.
To walk the Songlines is to become part of the ongoing creation of the world, a place that both exists and is still being formed. Thus, the Aborigines are not merely attached to the earth; they are essential to its existence. Without the land, they would die. But without the people, the ongoing process of creation would cease and the Earth would wither. Through movement and sacred rituals, the people maintain access to the Dreamtime and play a dynamic and ongoing role in the world of the Ancestors.

 

A moment begins with nothing. A man or a woman walks, and from emptiness emerge the songs, the musical embodiment of reality, the cosmic melodies that give the world its character. The songs create vibrations that take shape. Dancing brings definition to the forms, and objects of the phenomenological realm appear: trees, rocks, streams, all of them physical evidence of the Dreaming. Should the rituals stop, the voices fall silent, all would be lost—everything on Earth is held together by the Songlines, everything is subordinate to the Dreaming, which is constant but ever changing. Every landmark is wedded to a memory of its origins and yet always being born. Every animal and object resonates with the pulse of an ancient event, while still being dreamed into being. The world as it exists is perfect, though constantly in the process of being formed. The land is encoded with everything that ever has been and everything that ever will be in every dimension of reality. To walk the land is to engage in a constant act of affirmation, an endless dance of creation.

 

The Europeans who first washed ashore on the beaches of Australia lacked the language or imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and spiritual achievements of the Aborigines. What they saw was a people who lived simply, whose technological achievements were modest, whose faces looked strange, whose habits were incomprehensible. The Aborigines lacked all the hallmarks of European civilization. They had no metal tools, knew nothing of writing, had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. Without agriculture or animal husbandry, they generated no surpluses, and thus had never embraced sedentary village life. Hierarchy and specialization were unknown. Their small seminomadic bands living in temporary shelters made of sticks and grass, dependent on stone weapons, epitomized European notions of backwardness. An early French explorer described them as “the most miserable people of the world, human beings who approach closest to brute beasts.” As late as 1902, a member of the Australian Parliament claimed, “There is no scientific evidence that the Aborigine is a human at all.”

 

By the 1930s, a combination of disease, exploitation, and murder had reduced the Aborigine population from well over a million at the time of European contact to less than half a million. In one century a land bound together by Songlines, where the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the next, from the future to the past and from the past to the present, was transformed from Eden to Armageddon. Knowing what we do today of the extraordinary reach of the Aboriginal mind, the subtlety of their thoughts, and the evocative power of their rituals, it is chilling to think this reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition, and insight very nearly ran dry during those terrible years of death and conflagration. As it is, Aboriginal languages, which may have numbered 250 at the time of contact, are disappearing at the rate of one or more per year. Only 18 are today spoken by 500 or more individuals.

 

Despite this history, the Aborigines have survived and, in time, may still have a chance to inspire and redeem a nation. But what of the other victims of conquest, the untold scores of nations driven out of existence by forces beyond their capacity to engage and overcome?

For at least 10,000 years the San Bushman occupied the sandveld regions of Botswana, Namibia, and southern Angola. Numbering perhaps 85,000, they were the descendants of a people who inhabited the entire subcontinent and much of East Africa thousands of years before the arrival of either black or white pastoralists and farmers. Unlike the agriculturists, who spread inexorably across the land, transforming the wild and constantly moving onward, the nomadic San essentially stayed put, engaged as hunters and gatherers in a seasonal round that left little mark on the Earth. Like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, they accepted the world as it was, and rather than struggle with the natural world, they moved to its rhythm—not out of conviction, but because their survival depended upon doing so. Thus they adapted to what was without doubt one of the most extreme landscapes on the planet.

 

Water is the great challenge. For ten months of the year there is none, at least on the surface of the ground. The San traditionally sought moisture in the hollows of trees, used hollow reeds to suck it out of sipwells beneath the mud, or resorted to hidden supplies, cached in ostrich eggs buried beneath the sand and marked with the insignia of the owner. For most of the year there was no water at all and the people were totally dependent on melons and tubers, and whatever liquid could be squeezed from the guts of prey. To replenish the three quarts of moisture lost each day through perspiration, the San had to consume 12 pounds of wild melon. And with the onset of the dry season in May, the melons shriveled, and the people were forced to dig for tubers deep within the sand. Throughout the year plants provided 80 percent of their food, but 90 percent of their water. The possibility of dying of thirst was a constant.

 

By September, the season of the Brown Hyena, the time of greatest privation, the San spent their days lying still in shallow hollows moistened with urine, tormented by clouds of flies and tortured by the withering heat. October marked the beginning of the Little Rains, teasing raindrops that touch the Earth but do little to relieve the drought. The heat continues. High winds sweep over the burned grasslands, and the spirits of the dead appear in the shape of dust devils, dancing across a gray and yellow landscape. Finally in January the rains return, and the next three months are a time of rebirth and regeneration. Some years great rolling clouds break open to flood the desert with thunderous downpours, inches of precious water that form silver sheets upon the desert. Some years it does not rain at all.

 

The rainy season from January to March is a time of relative abundance. People move about the desert in small extended family groups, harvesting seeds and fruit, rejoicing to find standing pools of water or hives of bees with rare offerings of honey, a sublime delicacy for a people whose diet for much of the year consists of fibrous roots and bitter tubers. April brings yet another change, a short autumn, the season of the hunter. This for the San is the favourite time of year. The rains have driven away the heat and the cold of winter has yet to descend. There is ripe food everywhere and the animals are fat.

 

Though the San depend largely on plants for their food, it is the act of hunting that defines them as a people. From family encampments the men range across the desert in small hunting parties of three or four, covering as much as 20 miles in a day, returning by night only to hunt again with the dawn. They carry just their weapons and a few essentials, a short bow and quiver of arrows, fire-making tools, a hollow reed to sip water from the sand, perhaps a knife, a short spear, a lump of gum or resin to make repairs. Moving in teams, they read the ground for signs. Nothing is overlooked. A trodden blade of grass, the direction of a tear in a leaf, the depth and shape of a track. Legendary stalkers, the San can distinguish and follow the sign of a single wounded animal though it moves in a herd of thousands. Every human footprint has a name, for the San recognize a person’s mark with the precision of a forensic expert linking a fingerprint to a suspect.

 

Everything is hunted. Hippos die in pits lined with poisoned poles. Elephants are brought down with the blow of an ax to the hamstring. Lions sluggish from gorging on meat are chased from a kill. Antelope are run to the ground, birds snared in nets woven from desert fibers. The hunting gear is primitive—spears and small arrows of limited range. But for the San the key to success as hunters lies in their knowledge of the prey and of the plants and beetle grubs, which properly prepared yield the most lethal of poisons. The slightest wound results in convulsions, paralysis, and death.

 

From the desert adaptation emerges a way of life. Nothing is wasted, least of all one’s own energy. In the heat of midday, people remain still. Taboos reserve certain foods for the weak and elderly: tortoise and ostrich eggs and other creatures such as snakes readily found and killed. All food is shared. To refuse a gift is an act of unforgivable hostility. To accept is to acknowledge one’s place in a community of life.

 

For the San, who never stay long in one place and yet never travel far from the land of their birth, the centre of social life is the encampment and the sacred fire that burns at its heart. For these desert peoples, the sun is not a sign of life, but a symbol of death. Life is found in the family hearth, the fire that brings warmth in the night and provides shelter in the darkness. A mother gives birth in the shadows and returns to the fire. When a marriage fails, a young girl slips away and heads home to her father’s fire. An elder, no longer capable of keeping up with his group, is left behind to die, a circle of brush built around him to keep back the hyenas, a fire at his feet to lead him on to the next world. To placate the God of the West, the spirits of the dead, and all the forces of evil, the San dance, spinning around the fire in trance, placing their heads in the burning coals as the energy moves up their spines, touching the base of their skulls and diffusing through their bodies and into the earth itself. Whenever trouble threatens, the San kindle a fire and find solace and protection in the flames.

 

 

Reprinted by arrangement with the National Geographic Society from the book Extreme Landscape.
Copyright © 2002 National Geographic Society.