An authentic Kalahari experience

I’m in the middle of Botswana’s Central Kalahari desert glugging seven-month-old water from a buried ostrich egg, and it’s one of the sweetest and most welcome drinks I’ve ever had.

Deception Valley – so-called because from a distance a dry riverbed appears to run deep and full – lies on the northern border of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (five million hectares of one of the largest conservation areas in the world). Criss-crossed by fossil rivers and covered with myriad dead lakebeds, this legendary area straddles the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s harsh, inhospitable, undeveloped and largely inaccessible to humans – unless, like me, you are privileged to go walking with some of its original people, now almost a vanished race.

It’s mid-afternoon in mid-winter, and I’m following two Naru Bushmen through the desert (“we like to be called bushmen because we are people of the bush”), Xhuta and his son, Xuma. They are tiny, compact men, with smooth, golden skin, peppercorn hair, and eyes that pierce the endless horizons. They seem ageless – it’s hard to tell father from son. Dressed in skins and thong sandals, with their bows and arrows over their shoulders, and carrying a spear and a digging stick, they lead the way through the dry grass and bush. This may seem a cruel and unforgiving environment to strangers, but to the nomadic Bushmen it is a land of plenty, offering food, medicine, clothing, meat and drink. And magic.

We stop at a plant that cures stomach ills, which, when in purple flower, provides a rich dye for the raiment of a chief. Xuma breaks off straight branches from a the commifera plant, and shows us how to notch it to make a firestick. When this bush fruits, a caterpillar breeds, and its fallen pupae provide a deadly neurotoxic poison used to hunt animals.

Xhuta is careful to explain in his soft, clicking language, translated by Jacobus, our guide, that you must never put the poison on the tip of the arrow – in the excitement of the hunt you could scratch yourself. He mimes falling down dead. The poison is put on the shaft, which will embed itself in the animal’s body. Their bows of velvet raisin wood are small but strong.

Bushmen are such good trackers that they can steal up to a few metres from their prey before accurately loosing their arrows. Then, says Xuma, we go back to our huts for two or three days while the poison makes its deadly way through the animal’s system. They then track the fallen oryx, carefully cutting out all the meat around the arrow, and then cooking the rest of it for a very long time to ensure that the poison has gone.

The quivers for their arrows are fashioned from the root of the umbrella thorn, the impala skin shoulder bags sewn with needles of acacia thorn, the "thread" animal sinews. The Achilles tendon of the kudu is particularly prized for sewing because it is so long.

Xuma points out the brandy bush, lurching back and forth to show us its effects. In the rainy season the pip of the fruit produces yeast, the pip’s husk, sugar. Result? Seventeen percent alcoholic "Bushmen beer".

The sun is now beginning to burn down beyond the horizon and we’re very thirsty. Xhuta and Xuma, who have been carefully searching the ground as we go along, finally stop. They dig down into the sand and uncover an ostrich egg sealed with the leaves of the Kalahari currant bush, which keeps the water inside fresh for up to seven months. We gulp it down gratefully.