Many would cringe at the thought of living as these people did. They may be imagining a lifelone struggle to survive, a dark unhappy life, or the life of an animal with no intellect or culture. All of these visions are far from accurate, in fact these ancient people only worked a few hours a day and their lives where usually filled with festive ceremonies and laughter. They lived without the modern day dilemas of pollution, crime, poverty,hate, and even war as we know it. Their lifestyles provide for us a series of models of what many would consider "superior societies", however, due to our forever growing human population we as a society could never go back to these ways. The sad truth is that our Earth can no longer support it's human inhabitants. We have painted ourselves into a corner with our agricultural technology and our meat industries. Hopefully through studying these people and their lost skills, we can find a sanctuary somewhere between their lifestyles and ours which may give the Earth a realistic chance to repair and maintain what we have nearly destroyed in only 10 thousand years.
Trekking across the desert wastes of the Rub al-Khali of Saudi Arabia, a party of Bedouin nomads accompanied by an English explorer advanced in silence under the sun's relentless glare. They progressed at a steady walking pace in order to conserve the energy of their camels: The only food available for these beasts consisted of the dry leaves and thorns of occasional bushes, and it might be several days before the party reached the next water hole. On the flat gravel plains, they averaged around three miles an hour; where the dunes were steep and the sands yielded at every footstep, they managed no more than half this rate. They had seen no other human beings for seventeen days.Abruptly, the party came to a halt on hard ground. A gray-bearded Bedouin dismounted and examined some camel tracks that were partly blurred by the wind. "Who were they!" demanded the group's leader. The bearded man broke some camel droppings between his fingers and reported that the tracks had been made ten days earlier by six members of a particular tribe; the riders had raided another tribe on the southern coast and had stolen three of their camels; and they had last taken water at a well named Mughshin.
The Englishman Wilfred Thesiger had learned not to be surprised by his companions. "Here every man knew the individual tracks of his own camels," he reported, "and some of them could remember the tracks of nearly every camel they had seen. They could tell at a glance from the depth of the footprints whether a camel was ridden or free, and whether it was in calf. By studying strange tracks they could tell the area from which a camel came."
For the Bedouin, reading imprints in the sand with such accuracy was as com- monplace a skill as is, say, a contemporary city dweller's ability to drive a car or purchase a theater ticket by telephone. This skill was also crucial to their survival: It could tell them the whereabouts of their enemies, a precious water hole, or an animal for the cooking pot. And this was just one example of their intimate cognizance of the harsh environment in which they lived. Their hereditary knowledge had enabled them to feed and clothe themselves and cure their ailments by methods that had hardly varied for thousands of years.
Wilfred Thesiger traveled with the Bedouin for many months in the late 1940s, and the qualities he came to admire most in his companions were their dignity, courage, endurance, and generosity. But when in the 1970s the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia transformed forever the lives of the Bedouin, when trucks replaced camels, and television antennas sprouted from black felt tents, what the rest of the world had most to mourn was the loss of an entire memory bank of knowledge of the natural world. When skills are no longer needed, they quickly die out.
Taken from "THE NATURAL WORLD", a TIME LIFE BOOK.
Animal Tracking is an artform practiced by few today. However the ability to read animal tracks was one of the first feats performed by man that distinctively seperated us from the rest of the animal world. To read a track is to look into the past, present, and future. Man forms the understanding that an animal came walking through here, that he is probably still walking (depending on the freshness of the track), and that if the track is followed the animal will be found. This is a form of reasoning utilized only by man. Other animals may hunt but they are only concerned by the present. For instance when a Lion sniffs out it's prey, the scent is physically there in the present and he simply follows it until it leads to the prey. If a lion where to walk up on a gazelles track he would think nothing of it. Tracking is a skill so uniquley human and at the core of our evolutionalry leap that to practice and understand it brings us closer to the rest of the natural world than we have probably ever been before. While tracking the spirit of all things can consume and guide you, the energy that brings us one step at a time to becoming the animal that we are following. To understand his movements, his reasoning, and his emmotions is to obtain the spiritual reward of tracking..Although the original trackers where our hunter-gatherer ancestors, tracking has many uses today beyond hunting. I personally use it for wildlife photography and observation. It can often be used to locate lost humans in the wilderness. To learn about this great art I highly recommend Tom Brown's Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking. It will take you on a journey to discovering your place within the world and bring you down from societies pedistal and into the web of life. Please send any comments to ythous01@sprynet.com
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IMAGES OF THE WORLD...
THE CRANE FOUNDATION
