Hide, Horn, Fish, and Fowl: Texas Hunting and Fishing Lore

MAKING A DRIVE IN BOTSWANA

Lions in Botswana 7978-ch01.pdf 10/6/11 8:14 AM Page 24 MAKING A DRIVE IN BOTSWANA by Francis Edward Abernethy  Making a drive has been a hunting custom as long as man has been a man—and even before. When a community’s survival depended upon a successful hunt it was important that early man hunted for game in the most efficient way. One way was to form a long line of hunters spaced ten or twenty feet apart. They moved forward, side by side, making a drive and flushing and killing any game that started in front of them. Men still make drives. Quail, pheasant, and grouse hunters line up and seine the grasslands, shooting the birds that rise in front of them. Sometimes four or five men will space themselves in a line a hollering distance apart and make a drive to flush deer out of their brushy hiding places. The point is that making a drive is a contemporary hunting custom among humans that is steeped in antiquity, and I believe that it is also a much older instinct. After a trip to the Okavango Delta in Africa in June of 1996, I wrote Thad Sitton the following letter (dated 11/26/08), in which I discussed my views on the genetics of hunters: Did I ever tell you about the time in Botswana, when we came on this pride of lions preparing for a hunt? We had been tracking them for over an hour in a Land Rover. We finally came upon them just after sundown in a long clearing at the edge of a field of man-tall grass. I guess there were about a dozen lions in all. About half were fullgrown females and the rest were adolescents and teenagers. They were all flopped around, sniffing each other, playing grabass, taking naps—totally 25 7978-ch01.pdf 10/6/11 8:14 AM Page 25 unconcerned. They greeted each other with friendly social sniffs and ambled around, never in a hurry, quite calm, seeming to swap the gossip of the day. Then on some invisible (to us) signal they began sauntering along the clearing, with singles stopping in place about every six to eight feet. They looked disorganized, but in the end they were stretched out in a discernIble line, grownups at both ends and scattered through the middle. Most were sitting. Some of the young lions were lying down, dozing. At another imperceptible signal the pride of lions all came awake, arose, and casually ambled off to our left and into the tall grass. I had lost track of time, but it seemed to me that all this lining up took around twenty to thirty minutes, maybe less. This mixed pride of lions, as trifling and lazy as they looked in the process, became a deadly pack of hunters, seining the grass and scrub brush for game. That was the last we saw of that pride, but the hunters were successful; they killed a kudu down near the pond below the camp, and we could hear the roars of the old males as they came to the feast. They were still hanging around the kill talking about the hunt when the sun came up. Just like folks! I was sitting on a deer stand yesterday afternoon—like a big cat at the edge of tall grass—when I heard a twig snap. My head snapped around, my nostrils instinctively flared, and I could feel the muscles of my ears pulling them back to attention. I will bet that my pupils contracted at the same time. Just like a cat. 26 The Hunting Drive and Its Place in Our Lore 7978-ch01.pdf 10/6/11 8:14 AM Page 26 Making a Drive in Botswana 27 Ab in a tree, listening like a big cat 7978-ch01.pdf 10/6/11 8:14 AM Page 27 ...