Thick, cold drops of rainwater fell from my hood into the wet, dark orange sand, leaving a round, symmetrical circle in the coarse grains. I tilted my head to the side and squinted my eyes. In front of me were four fresh hoof prints of an antelope, that much was clear. Simple. But which one? I held my left index finger over one of the prints and estimated, ‘Mhm, about 5 centimetres, quite big. Too big…’

I was in the middle of the final assessment for ‘tracker’, tracker, and the whole week was already under the topic ‘Tracks & Sign’. Since Monday, we had been walking around the Kuleni Game Reserve with Graham and sometimes with Christiaan, taking a close look at every little track. We had interpreted centipede, ant and dung beetle tracks, had received tips and tricks for distinguishing between the different antelope tracks, and learned how to find out which hoof of the giraffe is front and which is back, which paw of the mongoose is left or right. Graham had shown us how the track pattern can change based on the speed at which the animal moves, and we had learned how one and the same track can change its shape after just a few metres – simply because the surface changes.

On Wednesday evening, a tracker expert from the ‘Tracker Academy’ arrived at the camp to take our knowledge to a whole new level. Jerry, our assessor for the exam, was an extremely polite and well-groomed man in his thirties. As if he wanted to consciously set a contrast to the rawness of the bush, he led us through the bush of Kuleni from Thursday morning, dressed in beige trousers and light-coloured suede shoes.

‘People like Jerry have tracking in their genes,” Graham whispered to me, who had gone from being an instructor to a participant, and added, ’Even if we only spent every day tracking from today onwards, we wouldn’t come close to his level. People like Jerry have learned tracking from the best teachers and in nature, day after day, since it was in its infancy. People like Jerry simply see this world with different eyes.‘

’I wish I could do that,‘ I replied enviously.

’Yeah, me too,” Graham sighed back, while we slowly followed the group in front of us, side by side.

The last week had been very educational, but also very exhausting and somehow very long. Besides walking many kilometres, we had also spent a lot of time just waiting. While the instructors searched for, found and circled suitable tracks, which we were then allowed to interpret one after the other, the others had to wait. However, interpreting a track, with all its details, takes time. Of course, it can be nice to just stand in nature and do ‘nothing’ – but when you have an upcoming final exam on your mind, then at least for me, the relaxed ‘doing nothing’ is more difficult and my impatience grew during the week.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed interpreting the messages, and the bush, the sandy imprints on the paths or the holes in the ground suddenly became so much more than just displaced sand. After a little practice, I was soon able to recognise entire stories from the smallest clues! My perception is changing – slowly and with still a lot of room for improvement, but it is changing.

A washout

Unfortunately, the weather also changed. On Tuesday, we had a humid 29 degrees and were moaning under the heat, but on Saturday, the day of the assessment, heavy rain and windy 12 degrees awaited us. Despite all the weather app warnings, Jerry kept us on standby all day. So we sat in the clammy classrooms from 6 a.m., while Jerry hoped for a spontaneous, unannounced change in the weather. Of course, I had often experienced that weather forecasts were not always entirely accurate and sometimes there were some surprises, but with a 90% chance of rain all day long at 2-5 litres per square metre, I thought you had to admit that you were ‘lost’.

But Jerry saw it differently, which led to me kneeling in the wet sand on Saturday afternoon, not only softening my brain over antelope tracks while rainwater ran through my rain jacket and into my trousers. ‘Listen to your intuition,’ I heard Graham say in my head. ‘Got it,‘ I whispered, stood up, fumbled for my sodden, damp notebook under my rain jacket and scribbled “Njala” on the soft, wavy pages under no. 3.

‘Wrong. Impala!’ Jerry replied, gesturing for me to walk past him with a dynamic hand movement. ‘Damn. Impala. But weren’t they huge?‘ I murmured quietly and frustratedly, but obviously loud enough for Jerry to hear.

’Yes, that happens because the sand is now completely soaked. Then the tracks often look bigger. So pay attention,” he replied and then turned to the next participant.

After another eight tracks, we stopped. The rain had become heavier again and a large part of the participants were now soaked to the skin. The quantity and quality of the tracks also diminished more and more and there was hardly a dry spot on my trousers. At least the rain jacket kept me wonderfully dry. ‘Let’s continue tomorrow, have a good evening,’ Jerry called out to us before the dripping hooded figures disappeared into the shelters.

I, on the other hand, strolled to the common area, grabbed my black coffee cup and poured steaming boiling water from the boiler into my cup. The brown, almost creamy circles of the instant coffee had not yet completely disappeared when I sat down again in front of my workbook in the clammy classroom and took off the cap of my black gel pen with my teeth. I still had a lot to do, because the final exam was coming up soon. I took a sip of the hot coffee and watched the thick, silver-grey strings of the continuous rain in the courtyard.

The big picture

I had now been in training at Bhejane Nature Training for 83 days, but spontaneously it didn’t feel like I had already become particularly knowledgeable. This was a bit worrying, as I already had my final exam for the Nature Guide coming up in a fortnight. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realised that a lot had happened to and in me in the last 83 days – and that I had learned quite a bit after all.

If I had imagined meeting a version of myself from three months ago, fresh out of camp, I would have been very impressed with my level of knowledge. I could now do the orientation tour that Tobi had given me back then, and my English, though still not to my liking, had improved a lot – communicating no longer took up as many of my resources.

I noticed a particular development, however, in that I kept coming across familiar things. Not everything was new anymore and some things started to repeat themselves. Slowly, very slowly, the individual elements and modules began to drift towards each other and form something new, a whole. Slowly, everything began to interlock and make sense. At that time, I could only guess what my level of knowledge and professional self-confidence would be if I spent three years here, like the long-term students. But I didn’t have that luxury. I had to make do with 123 days.

Certified tracker

When we tried to start the tracking assessment again at around 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, we realised that the rain we had been dreading over the last few hours had also given us a gift: a brand new, fresh ‘canvas’ of even sand. All the tracks from the previous days, especially our own, had completely disappeared, creating seemingly perfect conditions for fresh, new impressions. Seemingly, that is. Because the ground was still so saturated from the water that some tracks continued to appear in unusually large and massive forms.

We did our best, craned our necks, sanded the knee area of our trousers, trained our eyelid muscles and interpreted one track after another until our brains threatened to melt again. But when the sun caressed our shoulders on Sunday afternoon, we had actually all made it!

After fifty tracks and specific questions about the tracks, Jerry, visibly proud, gave us the ‘thumbs up’. All of them had proven that they were able to carefully assess and interpret tracks and their surroundings and could now call themselves ‘trackers’.