Sand rivers by Matthiessen Peter & Lawick Hugo van 1937-

Author:Matthiessen, Peter & Lawick, Hugo van, 1937-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zoology
Publisher: New York : Viking Press
Published: 1981-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

PETER MATTHIESSEN

made of quartzite and chert. The ones we found together are from the Middle Stone Age and consist of disc or tortoise cores, and flakes struck off when making similar cores. Dating is impossible since the Middle Stone Age culture apparently covered a wide span of time which started about 200,000 years ago. I did find three handaxes after you left, and these are older. They are from the Acheulian handaxe culture which came to an end 200,000 years ago. Again, this culture covered a large expanse of time so these handaxes could be considerably older."

Later that day, we had a strange sense of timelessness when in a stream bed we found more hominid traces: catfish bones lay on a large flat rock in the stream, beside them the three stones of a small cooking fire. Near the stones lay a long tweezer carved from a green stick, the tips of which had been bound with fiber to hold the fish while it was broiled over the fire. Stuck into a bush, as if the wanderer meant to return, was the traditional flat-bladed wood spoon used for stirring porridge, and a place in the stream bed had been cleared where a man might sleep. We couldn't believe that a poacher would be all alone - for we both had the distinct feeling that this camp had been used by just one person - or would make his camp within sight of the track, although these tracks south of the Liwale-Madaba road were rarely traveled. Who was it, then, who walked by himself in the remote southern Selous, a hundred miles or more from the nearest hut? Perhaps a honey poacher? Whoever it was must have carried a pot and something to cook in it, and he must have been confident in the bush, since there was no sign of a bonfire to scare off animals. Excepting the shadow of his bed and the rude implements at the faint hearth, the unknown traveler had left little more behind than the stone tool makers of hundreds of centuries before him.

Off the track ahead, a kudu cantered back into the scrub before stopping in a screen of thin gray saplings to inspect us; she seemed to know how well these saplings blended with the thin silver stripes on her pretty flanks. Certainly she would never be seen by passers-by in these sere woodlands of the dry season, and I wondered how many of these creatures watched us pass. Then leaf shadows shifted, a huge gray kudu bull was there beside her, big pink ears twitching with apprehension in the soft autumnal light, and through binoculars 1 could make out a second female, then a third, a few steps back in the brown sun. Hugo tried to come up closer, but the animals overcame their curiosity and withdrew into the wood.

One day Hugo, Rick, Karen, Maria, and I walked perhaps ten miles up the Luwegu until we found a place we liked on a black granite outcrop that rose from a rock ledge overlooking an harmonious bend in the river.

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