The Nomadic Alternative – Page 120

the caravan that they could hunt them with arrows and with dogs ...

If you kill an animal, there is water in its intestines. I have seen the Messourites press one of these organs and drink the liquid it contained." The Nemadi continue this practice today.

One day in March last year I found the Nemadi sheltering under the speckled shade of an acacia tree. The cadence of their laughter sounded like water bubbling up from a spring. But the hunters faced a crisis which threatened their existence. Ignorant fools from the city had come with long-range rifles and shot the herds for sport.

As there were few animals left, experts had advised the government to order a general ban on hunting. Next the authorities tried to turn the hunters into good shepherds and gave them sheep and goats.

The experiment failed. The Nemadi feasted on meat every night till the animals were gone. "Now", they said, "we have nothing. Nothing to do but to laugh."

In this band there were twenty seven Nemadi from the smallest babies to the very old women. These babies had noaia of the skin diseases or the pot bellies of undernourished children in the oases, and the women were unveiled and open faced. Their spokesman had said to me, "If you give us a goat, we will kill it and eat it." So we bought a goat from a nearby herdsman, and a few minutes later there came a muffled cry from behind a thorn bush, the women beating out a cheerful tune on a few tin cans to announce the arrival of supper. They attribute the charm of their smiles and the whiteness of their teeth to their diet and the good exercise of their jaw muscles. "It is the meat that makes our smiles so beautiful", they said.

On a low hill above the camp stood a single tent. In it an old woman lived alone with two dogs and a cat. She was nearly a hundred, they said. Some minutes later I heard a low warbling sound that came from the direction of the tent. The old woman had seen the arrival of the foreigner and was walking through the acacia scrub towards us, tall, head high, her white face rumpled with age, but lit with the smile of some archaic tenderness. She was deaf and