wisdom
At the front of every safari vehicle sits a steadfast figure, scanning the landscape, raising a tracking stick — an almost sacred extension of their hand — to point out what you otherwise would’ve missed: a chameleon, leaf-like and almost invisible in the dense bush; a leopard whose dappled coat becomes the branch and foliage it rests among; the path a giraffe took yesterday, traced to where it’s browsing now. Trackers are rarely talkative on a drive. They’re tuned into a frequency that requires total presence and focus. When the vehicle stops, they’re off, eyes on the ground, disappearing into thickets, circling spoor or scat in the dirt, stitching together the intangible threads of the ecosystem’s story for everyone to follow. Their art appears at first to be about noticing, but it’s really about understanding. What left a footprint, what broke a twig, what disturbed a patch of earth? An experienced tracker knows the answers and follows them to reveal
the wild’s depth. Much of this knowledge is inherited, then deepened through years of experience. “It all came from my father, Wilson” says Ruel Ngwenya, a Tracker at Singita Sabi Sand and an instructor at the Tracker Academy . “It was part of life. I thought everybody could do it.” His father kept a garden where he grew fruits and vegetables. Sometimes wildlife would slip past its fence of branches and help themselves. “We would see their tracks,” he says, learning to identify them from an early age. Utha, his village, lies between two wildlife reserves, and animals would sometimes wander into it. “It was a competition between us to see who knew more about them.” Wilson also had goats and cattle, and tradition meant Ruel had to help tend them. “When you’re seven or eight years old, you start to look after the goats, and you have to make sure they all come back at night.” That meant tracking
Previous spread The wisdom of tracking, like care for the natural world, endures when it is shared. Left For Ruel, tracking is simply a part of life. A way of being, passed down from his father, and from countless generations before him.
Powered by FlippingBook