A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Page B

two hundred miles—which is a very long way through heavy bushland—the Bushmen with us thought that /Gam was near. They probably would have found it more easily had they been on foot, because sensing the landscape from inside a truck can be confusing.
    By then we had used almost half of our water. My dad’s plan was to travel until we used half of our supply, at which point we would follow our tracks back to the nearest settlements, refill our fifty-gallon drums, and try again. The time was coming when we might need to do this. But one day the guides saw smoke and realized from its appearance that it wasn’t a wildfire but a campfire. We went in that direction and found /Gam.
    We had hoped to find a Bushman encampment. But as we came near we saw several cattle, then several small, round Tswana-style dwellings made of poles with grass thatches. Two Tswana 3 men wearing shorts, shirts, and broad-brimmed hats came to meet us. We were to learn that they were the relatives of a cattle-rich man who lived about a hundred miles away in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Tswana people divided their large herds into smaller herds and distributed them among different relatives to take to better pasture. This was why these cattle were at /Gam. They had come there about eighteen months earlier, or so we were told, during the rainy season.
    But how did their owner know of /Gam? He had learned about it from Bushmen. That certainly told us something. We had learned about /Gam from Bushmen two hundred miles to the west. The rich man had learned about /Gam from Bushmen a hundred miles to the east. It would seem that the Bushman community, sparse though it was, reached right across the interior.
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    One of the men who came to meet us was clearly in charge, so we asked his permission to camp nearby and take some water. He graciously welcomed us and granted us permission. We set up our camp and filled three of our fifty-gallon drums. That was a hundred and fifty gallons of water, but the water level in the water hole hardly went down. Where, in that dry country, did it come from, with only a few inches of rain a year? I wish I could answer that question, but all I know is that it wasn’t fossil water from one of the prehistoric lakes that are found at great depths in places like the Kalahari, because the water hole itself was dug by hand and wasn’t deep enough for that. Perhaps the water hole was in some kind of basin that collected water from the rock ledges above it. We were later to take three hundred gallons and more at a time without worrying anyone, because overnight the water in the hole would return to its normal level.
    We were also to learn that the water at /Gam was the most plentiful of all the Bushmen’s sources. So /Gam was unique. But /Gam no longer belonged to Bushmen. Thus the Bushmen at /Gam were something like the two Bushmen who came with Fritz Metzger. Their people had lost their land to Fritz’s father. They didn’t “use” it, according to the occupying farmers, and they didn’t have a deed. Nor could they resist the farmers. Their groups were too small. They became farm laborers.
    The same thing was starting at /Gam. The Bushmen performed some services for the Tswanas, such as collecting firewood and herding some of the livestock. They also hunted and gathered to feed themselves, and were free to leave /Gam if they didn’t like it, because all of them had relatives at other water sources, so they lived in the Old Way, to be sure. But they were tasting their future.
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    As we set up our camp, the headman’s young wife came to see us, carrying a baby. Our camp manager, Philip Hameva, told me that she was Herero, not Tswana, and that her name was Kavasitjue, which means “submission to the will of God.” Kavasitjue wore a headscarf and a long dress, and, as I was thrilled to learn, she spoke a little Afrikaans.
    I did too. Soon we were chatting as best we