![]() These guns, costing up to $200,000, are favored for big-game trophy hunting because of their stopping power, and this is what he was here for, of course-a trophy. Last to emerge in that swelter was the client himself, an American businessman, who opened the passenger door and reached up to the rack for his gun, a 12-pound, bespoke. The rest of us unloaded, followed by the tracker they only ever called the Old Man, another tracker in training, and one more San, who was acting as a “game guard” to make sure the hunt was conducted in accordance with the conservancy’s rules and quotas. If Nyae Nyae’s desert scrub is home to San families, it is also home to some of the last, biggest wild elephants in the world. He stood over the impression for a moment, a quizzical expression on his face, and nodded his head in agreement. Strapping, ruddy, and blond, in his 40s, he seemed straight from central casting, wearing a cloth hat and shorts. He motioned, and Felix Marnewecke, the professional hunter and guide on this expedition, popped out of the driver’s side door. Dam jumped down, checking a footprint, its edges corrugated and etched inside with smaller bubbles. ![]() He tapped on the door, and we came to a whiplashing halt. “Oliphant!” he cried, leaning hard over the right side of the vehicle, picking out tracks in the sand. And those eyes belonged now to Dam, a short, compact man, a tracker from the local San people who stood in the back of the Land Cruiser. For such enormous creatures, they were nearly invisible but to the sharpest eyes. Later, more materialized on the horizon, in the shade of the camel thorn trees, shades themselves. When they caught our scent, our sweat mixing with the sun-scorched grasses, they broke into a trumpeting jog and were gone. The elephants left snapped branches and warm scat in their wake. With the September temperature pushing a hundred degrees at midday, the pachyderms were moving at the edge of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia in a community-run wildlife reserve, or conservancy, called Nyae Nyae, where roughly 2,800 San people live today in unyielding conditions. The people in this story agreed to be photographed on condition that their names be withheld.Įlephants kept appearing in wrinkled herds, loitering near the dusty pans, in search of water. This story was originally published in the October 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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