Tale guide

The bush parted with a burst of the sound of parting dry undergrowth and paws rapidly striking soft sand,  and from out of a cloud of red dust we suddenly came face to face with a monstrous black-maned lion loping at full speed, head down, eyes focussed beyond us. Botha, my Khoisan companion, dropped instantly to his haunches, and I instinctively followed his example. My heart had stopped, frozen in that terrifying moment. We were so close; I could see its enormous leg muscles rippling beneath the skin as he charged forward. Like a stone statue I crouched motionless, hardly breathing. My focus was fixed entirely on this beast they call King. In what seemed a very long time but was in fact a flash, the lion charged right past us, so close that I could have touched him. I smelt his strong pungent body odour through the dust that powdered up into the air as he ran. In another flash he was gone and I was left confused and terrified and overcome by a wave of relief, all at the same time.

Botha and I had been walking for days and found ourselves deep inside the Kgalagadi; a desert widely known as the Kalahari that extends over 9000 square kilometres across Botswana, the Northern Cape of South Africa and Namibia. But not really, nor even officially, a desert, given the annual rainfall that sustains life for the hundreds of animals, trees and plants that have made this their home over thousands of years, where they have all adapted to the fluctuating temperatures and generally dry desert-like conditions.

Botha, son of Hermanus Khoi, a village headman, had offered me an opportunity of a lifetime to spend time with him in the desert and so far we had spent three nights in the wilderness. ‘If he left me now,’ I thought, ‘I wouldn’t have a clue how to get out again.’

We stood quietly looking back following the charging lion as it disappeared into the near distance. Earlier we had passed by a small herd of Gemsbok, or Oryx in English. Beautifully tall, standing proud against the background of red sand dunes often shifting in the wind. We could see the clouds of dust from the herd on the run and Botha explained that there was more than one lion in the pride, and they had launched an ambush of the Gemsbok and had likely picked out a young buck for dinner.

He had never found himself in the flight path of a charging lion before and under any other circumstances should have detected the presence of the pride long before the close encounter. Botha was clearly upset with himself while I was still reeling from how close we came to a grizzly end.

Botha spoke a version of Afrikaans and it took no time at all for me to appreciate that his bush skills were on another planet, let alone level, recent experience notwithstanding.

Finally, our nerves settled, and we carried on walking

in a north easterly direction, occasionally stopping for

Botha to examine a stem of grass or a twig on the edge

of a bush or some animal spoor in the sand.

Today was completely still, which could explain how he

didn’t detect the presence of lion ‘downwind’ from us.

Probably forty odd degrees in the shade. We had rested under a camelthorn tree during the midday sun. We had sat quietly, speaking very little and usually only when I asked a question about this strange and awe-inspiring habitat. We spoke in soft undertones as if not to intrude in nature’s wonderland.

Above us, a huge nest of sociable weavers interweaved the branches of the tree. It must have been home to maybe 500 birds or more and when they suddenly all left the nest simultaneously, they flew in a twisting tornado-like formation high into the sky in a spectacular murmuration.

As the sun began to drop towards the west, Botha indicated we needed to find a place for the night. We built a small fire under the shade of a grove of camelthorn trees before Botha motioned me to stay as he slipped out of sight with his bow and arrow at the ready, in search of some food.

The Kalahari is arid, covered by sand dunes interspersed by dry riverbeds and populated by small tuffs of grass, bushes, and trees in some places and miles upon miles of desert sand. I had read somewhere that there are huge tracks of water in the earth deep below the desert surface which feed occasional water holes that seem to come from nowhere. There is an ancient feel to the place. Its silence is over 20,000 years old. Its night sky amongst the brightest on earth where the trillions of stars twinkle from millions of light years away. There are moments that take your breath away like the colours of dawn and dusk. Here forked-tailed Drongos mimic  warning calls to unsuspecting meerkats that run for the cover, offering the bird the opportunity to feed on their food morsels.

Botha returned with a hare which he deftly skinned and strung on a skewer before placing it across two forked sticks above the fire. Then he took me to the edge of the camp and started to dig down into the sand under a large tuft of grass.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“N’abbas,” he replied. The ‘N’ was expressed more as a click than an ‘N’,

“N’abbas?” I exclaimed, not having clue.

“Wait!” Botha smiled at my surprised ignorance and raised his hand to signal patience.

Just below the ground, Botha gently loosened the soil and slowly extracted a truffle-like small potato no bigger than the palm of his hand. He gave it to me to hold as he moved to another spot where I noticed another crack in the ground near the grasses.

Soon Botha had found five reasonably sized vegetables which he peeled and sliced. They taste like a cross between a mushroom and a potato. Very pleasant in both taste and texture and it turns out that it is a delicacy sought out by the Bushmen as well as a cross section of burrowing wild animals like meerkats and foxes.

We settled down under canopy of stars feeding on roast rabbit and n’abbas as the night fell to the sounds of insects, owls and far away hyenas.

This was God’s country where your soul finds its way to the heavens all by itself, as it has done for the Khoikhoi for tens of thousands of years.