Daniel Quinn - The Story of B (eBook) by The Story of B

Author:The Story of B
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2010-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

The first thing: reading the signs

"Very impressive," I said.

"Very unimpressive, believe me, compared to what a real tracker could do, but good enough for our

purpose. There are several things I want you to see from this. The first thing is this: Chimpanzees make

and use tools, so tool-making and tool-using are not uniquely human, but the reading I've just done

here is uniquely human. Of course what I've done so far is only a sample of the hunting process. It's

like a still from a motion picture, which can suggest a mood and a theme but can't convey the process

of the film, which is intrinsically motion. At any moment during the hunt, the hunter is considering

these questions: What was the animal doing when it made this track? How long ago was it here? Which

way was it heading? How fast was it going? How far away will it be by now?--keeping in mind the

season, the time of day, the temperature, the condition of the ground, the nature of the terrain, and of

course the typical behavior of the animal being tracked and other animals in the neighborhood as well.

"Here's a small example. One day an anthropologist was tagging along with a !Kung hunter in the

Kalihari. Around noon they abandoned one hunt as hopeless and started looking around for something

else to go after. Soon they came across a gemsbok track the hunter judged to be just a couple hours old.

After half an hour of tracking, however, the hunter called it off. He explained that the track hadn't been

made that morning after all, pointing out as proof a gemsbok hoofprint with a mouse track running

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