Free A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Page B

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.
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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.
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    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