NC

By Michael Paterniti
Photographs by David Chancellor
Elephants kept appearing in wrinkled herds,
loitering near the dusty pans, in search of
water. 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 communityrun
wildlife reserve, or conservancy, called
Nyae Nyae, where roughly 2,800 San people
live today in unyielding conditions.
The ele phants left snapped branches and warm
scat in their wake. When they caught our scent,
our sweat mixing with the sun-scorched grasses,
they broke into a trumpeting jog and were gone.
Later, more materialized on the horizon, in
the shade of the camel thorn trees, shades themselves.
For such enormous creatures, they were
nearly invisible but to the sharpest eyes. 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.
“Oliphant!” he cried, leaning hard over the
right side of the vehicle, picking out tracks in
the sand. He tapped on the door, and we came to
a whiplashing halt. Dam jumped down, checking
a footprint, its edges corrugated and etched
inside with smaller bubbles. He motioned, and
Felix Marnewecke, the professional hunter and
guide on this expedition, popped out of the driver’s
side door. Strapping, ruddy, and blond, in
his 40s, he seemed straight from central casting,
wearing a cloth hat and shorts. He stood over the
impression for a moment, a quizzical expression
on his face, and nodded his head in agreement. 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. This footprint was proof.
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. 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 .470
76 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017