From Nevada To The Kalahari--And On To D.C. and L.A.

From up here on the snowy mountaintop, the desert stretched away to infinity, a muted mosaic of blue-gray sage brush and grasses turned brown, gold and yellow for the winter, the hillsides dotted with dark green junipers and blackened stumps where some of the trees had been hit by lightning or burned by summer fires.

Lynn Lloyd, huntsman of the Red Rock Hounds near Reno, Nev., and I sat our horses, listening for hounds, who were some distance out to our front, out of sight and sound. The thick-packed snow creaked and groaned under the hooves of my big Dutch Warmblood, as he shifted and fidgeted, ears cocked toward the north.

There it was, the distant song of hounds, wafting toward us faintly, like the cry of wild geese on the wind.

"Yep," said Lynn, "thought so. They're traveling west on the far side of that second ridge. If we ride a little, we'll catch 'em."

Down the hillside we went, our horses slithering and skittering through the snow. We hit the desert floor at a hand gallop and tried to keep it there, conserving our mounts' energy, although both horses wanted nothing more than to set their heads low and fly as fast as they could just for the sheer joy of being out on this fine February morning.

As we hurtled forward, not talking, the hounds' cry coming in stronger now over the wind, my mind went back to another, very different kind of desert hunt on the opposite side of the world. No horses, no hounds, just me and the two tireless Bushmen hunters, tracking hour after hour through the parched Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Southern Africa.

We'd been on the trail of a gemsbok, a beautiful, horse-sized antelope with long, rapier-like horns and characteristic black stripes running from its nose to its eyes. It's a dangerous animal to hunt--sometimes, when it suspects the hunter is close, it will turn and charge, and the hunter suddenly becomes the prey.

So here we were, me and the two lean, young Bushmen armed with nothing but small bows and arrows poisoned with the juice of a beetle larvae--hunting as their forefathers had for 70,000 years. How strange that that hunt in Africa should have brought me here, to this moment, riding hard behind Lynn Lloyd and her Red Rock hounds.

Perhaps I Should Explain

Although I was born in Britain and grew up with horses and hunting very much as part of my life, my parents were not British. My mother was from South Africa, and my father was from what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. They raised me on stories about this hotter, more colorful, more dangerous and intriguing other world, and they took me there from earliest boyhood onward.

Eventually I became a journalist, covering Southern Africa for the British and sometimes the American press, returning north in the winter to hunt, and heading southward in the summers. In the mid-1990s I met Southern Africa's oldest people--the Bushmen, small, golden-skinned hunter-gatherers known to the world through films such as The Gods Must Be Crazy, which depicted them as a harmless, gentle people who never made war and had about them an air of child-like innocence.

To my amazement, I found that many of these myths were true; the Bushmen did indeed eschew war and most forms of violence, arming themselves only to hunt.