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

expenses. But at the time, the world of anthropology was focused in other directions. Not one anthropologist could be found with any interest in people who seemed to lack complex societies. The Bushmen were wrongly believed to be refugees who, it was said, had been driven into the backcountry by white farmers and Bantu pastoralists. I thought this was true when I wrote
The Harmless People
, and for years the concept clung. One anthropologist was later to say that the Bushmen in the interior were a “devolved” people who had once been farmers with cattle but then lost the cattle and resorted to eating wild foods for lack of anything else. Any further knowledge of such uninteresting people we would have to get for ourselves.
    Fortunately, my dad arranged for his expedition to be sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and also by Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and by the time we boarded a freighter bound for Walvis Bay on the coast of South West Africa (now Namibia) he had acquired a Dodge Power Wagon, two six-by-six army trucks, and an army jeep, all but the Power Wagon being World War II surplus that I believe he had obtained with the help of the Smithsonian. We also had camping equipment, camera equipment, recording equipment, a thirty-thirty rifle, and books about anthropology.
    While crossing the Atlantic, we read the books, or my mom did. My brother hung around with the first mate, who told fascinating stories about his maritime adventures, and my dad visited with the captain—both had served in World War I, the captain on a warship as a naval officer, my dad in France as a second lieutenant in the field artillery—or he spent time in the hold, checking on our equipment.
    As for me, I watched the sea, looking for whales and porpoises. One day I saw two huge fins going in the same direction and took them to be those of two big sharks, one following the other. But, oh my God, these were the tail and dorsal fins of a single shark, a supershark, a shark as big as the freighter! I wouldn’t have seen that if I had stayed in college.
    One night, near the equator, we saw the Southern Cross. The first mate pointed it out. I found it unimpressive compared to the Big Dipper and the North Star. Dad said it was all we’d have at night to know which way was south, so we’d better remember how to find it. And also, he reminded us, from then on the sun would be in the north, and we’d better remember that too, because where we were going, there would be little else to help us find our way if we got separated.
    The freighter was bigger than the town of Walvis Bay, or so it seemed. At least it was longer. When viewing the scene from afar, I saw the town’s little buildings in a cluster with the bow and stern of the docked freighter sticking out on both sides. The crane that successfully if scarily unloaded our vehicles stood up above the rooftops.
    We packed our equipment into the trucks and drove to Windhoek, which, although a small town at the time, was the capital of South West Africa. There we gathered our supplies, including empty fifty-gallon barrels for gasoline and water, and began the task of finding a camp manager, three mechanics, and interpreters who spoke English and !Kung, 2 the language of the Bushmen we hoped to visit. We had to settle for two interpreters, one who spoke !Kung and Afrikaans and another who spoke Afrikaans and English. We knew our conversations would be something like the game called Telephone, wherein a whispered message is passed around a circle, getting mangled as it goes. Better that we should speak !Kung ourselves, an effort that we began immediately.
    When we were ready we set off to the north, where Dad had met a German farmer named Fritz Metzger. Fritz spoke some !Kung. He had agreed to join us for a while, and with him he brought two Bushman men who were laborers on his farm. These men, Fritz told us, had heard of a source of water in the interior. We were