We stayed in an area of perhaps 6,000 square miles called Nyae Nyae in which were 15 waterholes, eight of them permanent and seven that sometimes went dry. The Kalahari antelopes didn’t need to drink water because they didn’t pant or sweat to cool themselves. Instead, their body temperatures could rise without doing them harm. But the predators needed water, as did the people, so the area around each waterhole was home to a group of Ju/wasi (the plural of Ju/wa) and also a pride of lions. And amazingly enough, the lions and the people didn’t hunt or attack each other.

Long ago, I spent some years in what now is Namibia, mostly in the Kalahari Desert. At the time, the Kalahari was virtually unexplored except by the people known as San, Bushmen, or Ju/wa hunter gatherers, now believed to have been the people from whom all of us descend. Their language is thought to be the root of all languages, and they had lived there for 200,000 years. Archeologists were to find an encampment which had been occupied continuously for 35,000 years.


I was 19 when I first went there, quite naive, so I assumed that this was normal. The Bushmen said that if they didn’t hunt the lions, the lions wouldn’t hunt them, which was enough explanation for me. But later I went to Etosha park, also in Namibia, where on two occasions I was stalked by lionesses unsuccessfully. They were considered to be very dangerous. It struck me that the Kalahari lions belonged to a different lion culture than the lions in Etosha. Or they did long ago. By now they hunt whatever they can, just like lions everywhere else.

I became fascinated with lions. I’ve written about them often, most recently in my new book, an autobiography called “Dreaming of Lions,” because now and then I see them in my dreams. In these dreams, a group of maybe seven or eight lionesses are standing around at the edge of my field. The moon is always up, of course, or else I wouldn’t be able to see them, and although the sight of them makes me anxious, as long as they stay at the edge of the field I’m not exactly frightened. Lions can’t hunt successfully on moonlit nights because their intended prey can see them. If I didn’t know that, in my dream, I might be scared stiff.


In the Kalahari, lions would visit the Ju/wa encampment as well as ours, beside it, mostly just to look at us and see what we were doing. Once a lioness roared at us for the longest time, and we thought she was telling us to leave, but when she thought she’d said enough she left without looking at us. Otherwise we walked around in the veldt all the time and rarely ever saw a lion. So did the Ju/wasi, because the arrangement in those days was that the people would move around by day and the lions would do so at night.

It would seem the system had been observed for 35,000 years and probably much longer, to everyone’s advantage. If the two groups had made trouble for each other, sooner or later one would have had to move, but where? The available waterholes were already owned by others of their kind. The people could have moved to live with relatives elsewhere, but then too many people would be using the same food supply, and the new lions would have fought with the resident ones until one group or the other was driven away. Both groups, it seemed, had decided that coexistence was the key to survival.


All of us kept the rules of the natural world at one time if we wanted to survive. The Bushmen kept them until farmers, pastoralists, and big game hunters took most of their land. The Old Way is gone. Today as individuals we’re better off now than we were back then — we have cars and cellphones and the like, and we no longer need to hunt and gather — but the way we’re going we won’t be around in 35,000 years, I’d wager, and neither will the lions.

Maybe that’s in my mind when I’m dreaming. Maybe the lions I see in these dreams are the ghosts of the Kalahari lions.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a naturalist and the author of many books, including “Dreaming of Lions: My Life in the Wild Places,” published this week. Submit your questions about animals to syandlizletters@gmail.com.