A Million Years with You (8 page)

Except for the wire and small bits of flat metal, the Gautscha people were living entirely in the Old Way, as our species had lived for thousands of years. They made their shelters from the branches of bushes stuck in the ground and woven together, then thatched with grass, creating little half-domes which are reminiscent of the nests made by the great apes. If you cup your hand and turn it sideways, it looks like the shelters of the Bushmen. If you cup your hand and turn it palm up, it looks like the nests of the great apes, and it's made in the same way, by weaving branches together and stuffing them with leaves.

This suggests that the concept of the Bushman shelters may be older than our species. When a glacial period trapped much of the world's water and turned the forests into grasslands, the trees withered out from under us. We adapted to the savannah just like the water-independent antelopes. But like everything else that lives in the Old Way, we didn't change anything unless we had to. Surely we kept on weaving branches together and stuffing them, by then not with rainforest leaves but with savannah grasses, because such nests or shelters protect their occupants from predators. After we lost our rainforests, we lost the safety of the trees, but we seem to have kept the nests, and wisely so, because lions and leopards—especially leopards, the most important predators of large primates—attack from behind when they're hunting. In the Ju/wa encampments, the shelters faced in all directions so that anything approaching someone from behind could be seen by someone else.

Why would people keep the same custom for hundreds of thousands of years? Because nothing that lives in the Old Way makes unnecessary changes. Because the shelters did what they were supposed to do. Because the shelters were easy to make, the materials were always available, nothing about them had to be transported, and they offered excellent protection. It would have been madness to make a different kind of shelter, especially a permanent shelter. And nobody did, because the nestlike shelters were perfect.

As for the antiquity of Ju/wa culture, I think of their religion. They had two gods, both of whom lived on the horizon, one in the east and one in the west. I found this very interesting, as the horizons are areas of transition, day to night, night to day, when the diurnal and nocturnal populations of the savannah change places. The god in the west was involved with the
/gauasi
, the spirits of the dead. His name was /Gaua (
/gauasi
is the plural of /Gaua) and he had to do with death. Evidently he had been around longer than the other god, probably from a time when our ancestral hunter-gatherers had only one language and one culture. Over the centuries the Bushmen divided into five groups, each with a different language and with varying views of the supernatural. But all of them knew /Gaua, which means he was with them before they separated, and may have been the first god in the world. Clearly, he is the oldest god now known.

I admired the Ju/wa religion. The two gods were not moral policemen, and took little interest in people except to send them good or bad luck for no better reason than that they felt like it. For instance, a god might take the form of a gemsbok, and if a hunter in all innocence shot him, the god would wait for him to eat the meat and then, once inside him, would kill him. Frankly, I thought that was a more realistic view of how life works than the views offered by the more modern worldwide religions.

 

I wonder about the anthropologist who claimed that Bushmen were a devolved people who lost their livestock and were forced to live on wild foods. If that were true, Bushmen were the fastest learners in human history, because within a very few years their entire population would have learned everything there was to know about their environment, down to the last detail, none of which had anything to do with pastoralism. In later years, professors from universities such as Harvard came to investigate Bushman knowledge, and despite their PhDs, the professors didn't have enough information to know what questions to ask. For example, no one asked about a weaverbird's nest, which, according to the Bushmen, had a compartment for a snake. Obviously superstition, of course, or so it seemed until an ornithologist learned that when a snake climbed the baglike nest, its weight opened the snake compartment while closing a higher compartment in which were the eggs or fledglings. The snake would find nothing and leave.

If you don't know that, you have no way to ask about it. So the best the professors could do was to see if what the western world knew—the various plant and animal species, for instance—compared to Bushman knowledge, and of course it did, because those who live in the Old Way must be accurate. Their survival did not allow for mistakes. I was wowed by a Bushman man named Ukwane who dissected an antelope for us, naming all of its parts—heart, stomach, kidney, testicles, and the like—and accurately describing their functions. When I was in college I dissected a dead cat in a biology class, learning only about half as much as Ukwane knew, but at least I learned enough to appreciate his knowledge. But no professor with a PhD had taught Ukwane.

To me the most stupefying piece of Bushman knowledge involved their arrow poison. It comes only from the pupae of two species of beetles and their parasites, all of which live on certain kinds of trees. But not on all of those trees, only on some of them. The adult beetles can be seen on the trees, but the adults play no role in human life and supposedly aren't poisonous. The adults lay their eggs on the leaves of the trees; the larvae climb down the tree under the bark and go out through the roots to pupate, making casings for themselves from the lumpy sand around them. It is in this state that they are poisonous. I often watched Bushman men digging for the pupae casings, but I couldn't distinguish them from the rest of the sand. The men could, though.

The trees are something like black walnuts in that nothing much grows around them, thus there's no special reason to dig there. Only a people who knew every detail of their environment could find, among the thousands of species of beetles, those who have poison, and at that, only in the pupae, which are encased in bits of the sand that surrounds them. If that's not enough, in one kind of beetle the poison gland is under the grub's arm so the arm must be pulled off to get it.

Yet the Bushmen learned of this poison long ago and have been using it on their little arrows ever since. It's one of the deadliest poisons on earth. It must enter the bloodstream, where it disintegrates the hemoglobin. One drop of it will kill a person in a day and will kill a large antelope in two to four days. Needless to say, the hunters must then track the antelope until she dies, so this brought out another astonishing skill of the Ju/wasi—their knowledge of tracks, which was phenomenal. They could read tracks as we read written words. My introduction to their ability involved a snake.

 

Near our camp, Ukwane found the hole of a great mamba. From its track, /Gai could tell that it was a black mamba twenty feet long and thicker than your arm, a monster. It lived in a “deserted” spring-hare burrow. Ukwane believed that the mamba has left for the veldt because so many people are present. We burned the hole with gasoline but nothing was in there. But I saw its track with my own eyes, so big my heart sank and my hairs stood on end or my knees turned to water—a terrifying sight, and we thought at the time, I remember, that there we were, talking, while just under our feet in the cool ground coiled in great coil after coil lay the black mamba, more deadly than a land mine, as my brother said, and ticking like a bomb. /Gai spent hours explaining the difference between the tracks of various snakes until at last he said, “We have lived a long time among the snakes and we just know when we see it whether it is a mamba or a puff adder or a python!” I learned that a puff adder track winds back on itself, a mamba track is more straight and larger than a cobra's, and a python's track is larger still and smooth (from the marks of scales) but not as smooth as a mamba's. Then there is the track of the tail—up the middle, a groove in the basinlike body of the track. A python's track shows the marks of his two tiny feet by his anus.

 

Before one of our expeditions, someone asked me to get the Ju/wa children to draw pictures. So I provided some kids with paper and crayons, neither of which they had ever seen before. Nor did the Bushmen we knew make any kind of visual representations. The girls refused to draw, but the boys were willing, and not surprisingly, they drew tracks. Of course they did. They were asked to produce a visual image, and the only visual representation of something that wasn't actually present would be its tracks. As each boy carefully drew a set of tracks, his friends would identify the animal who made them, meanwhile making the hand sign for the animal in question—the first and second finger up and straight to represent a gemsbok's horns, up and curved for a kudu's horns, thumb and little finger up and curved for a wildebeest's horns, and so on. These were the signs that hunters made when they saw something and wanted to tell their companions, but didn't want to spook whatever it was by talking. All the tracks the boys drew were those of antelopes, as these were the animals of greatest interest. Wherever people went—men, women, or children—they unfailingly observed and reported such tracks if they saw them.

One winter day I was off in the veldt with one of the boys who had drawn tracks. We came across the tracks of a hyena. The boy, who was nine or ten years old, showed me that over one of the hyena's footprints were tiny little pinpoints, which were the tracks of a beetle. He named the beetle. He also knew that those beetles don't move about until the air is warm enough, which on that day would have been shortly after sunrise. That meant that the hyena had passed by before sunrise, but not long before. The boy pointed out that the tracks were fresh, with no tiny crust around the edges made by drying dew.

That's a lot of knowledge from one kid about one footprint. If you multiply that by the 6,000 square miles of Nyae Nyae and the 35,000 years (at least) that people had lived there, you get a sense of Ju/wa information.

 

Something I treasure from my time at Gautscha is the name I was given. All of us received names, as the Ju/wasi based their relationships on kinship. Not to have kinship was to be an outsider, in which case the people would have difficulty relating to you. But to be a blood relative was unnecessary—their complex kinship system had arranged for all that. Your place in the system can depend on whom you're named for, and I was named Di!ai for a woman with whom I went gathering. I was honored to have her name, and I felt I belonged.

About thirty years later I returned to Nyae Nyae, not at first to Gautscha but to a government post called Tsumkwe that had developed in the interim. I was traveling alone in a rented pickup and knew of a gas station at Tsumkwe. But when I arrived, it was lunchtime and the gas station was closed. So I sat on the front bumper and waited.

Far in the distance, I noticed a Bushman man raking the lawn of one of the white people who worked at Tsumkwe—a missionary or a government employee. The man stopped raking and looked at me for a little while. Then he dropped his rake and started walking toward me, not by way of the footpath that led across the lawn he'd been raking or by way of the road that led to the gas station, as a western person might have done. Instead, in the manner of the Old Way, he walked straight across the white people's yards, as if the path and the road meant nothing to him.

I watched him coming, wondering if I knew him. As he got nearer, I saw that I didn't, but still he came. He walked right up to me, stopped in front of me, looked me in the eyes, and said, “You're Di!ai.”

Good God! I was Di!ai! But who was he? And how did he know me? No one knew I was coming—no one was expecting me. I asked his name. He told me, but still I didn't know him. Apologetically, I asked for the names of his parents. And when he told me that, I understood who I was looking at—a man who had been five or six years old the last time he had seen me. But that's the Old Way for you—if you don't write things down, you need memory. And you need to know what you're looking at too—he recognized me after thirty years from forty or fifty yards away. What I saw that day was just another mind-bending, jaw-dropping ability of the Bushmen.

 

For the rest of my life I've thought about the Bushmen. I've thought of the way they lived, the things they did, their social culture, and their material culture. Everything they owned except for a few beads and some pieces of wire for their arrowheads was made from things of the veldt—not many things, to be sure, but as many as anyone needs to live in reasonable comfort. No one really needs beads, for instance, but it's nice to have them, although not everyone did. So one day, as I began to write about these people for this book, I decided to compare their material culture with ours. I started with Di!ai, the woman I was named for, and remembered that she owned her front and back aprons, also her leather cape and the sinew string which served as a belt, also her digging stick, two or three empty ostrich eggshells in which the people carried water, the grass stoppers for those ostrich eggshells, her necklace of ostrich eggshell beads, perhaps four or five hair ornaments (actually, Di!ai gave her ornaments to someone else, but let's say she still had them), also a pair of leather sandals, and a tortoise shell in which she carried a sweet-smelling powder. If you count the sandals as one item, her possessions added up to nineteen items. This was entirely typical, as any woman might have a similar number of objects. Another woman did not have a tortoise shell but had a special string to tie around her waist. As I noted in my journal,
the string was to wind around her waist when she was very hungry to ward off the hunger or to kind of anesthetize it
.

As for a man, he would own his leather loincloth, a leather bag, perhaps a leather cape for warmth, perhaps a pair of sandals, also a quiver, perhaps eight or nine arrows, a knife, a spear, perhaps a digging stick, and a pair of fire sticks. He might also own a necklace or some other ornament, although many men did not. But let's say he did. That's also nineteen items, or twenty if you count the fire sticks separately. One man who happened not to have a necklace had an unusual object:
a thing which I have never seen before or since, like a fungus or a honeycomb, which he used, he said, when he was hunting. If birds saw him and made a noise he would bite off a piece which he would chew but not swallow, and would spit it at the birds to silence them
. All in all, you could almost hold the worldly goods of one of these people in your two hands.