Page 61 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE OUTBACK

w have ranged widely in the last chapter. Yet the

greater part of the world remains untouched; many other men
and women, of diverse physical types, saw the sun rise upon the
Second Millennium b.c. In their diversity they have one thing in

common: they accept the world as it is. They live on what the
world, as it is, can provide, and do not, as the other peoples we

have passed in review, seek to force nature into a more favora­
ble pattern. Instead of planting the crops they wish to eat, they
eat the crops which nature chooses to plant. Instead of herding

and penning the animals whose meat and pelts they wish to
use, they use the meat and pelts of the animals which happen to
exist within their range. They are hunters and fishers, and col­

lectors of the wild fruits of the earth.
Except for those who five close to the lands of cultivators
and herdsmen, they are not aware of having any choice in the

matter. No other way of living has ever existed; no other way of
living is even remotely conceivable. Fish and game and edible

plants are the only things that man can eat, and the only way to
get them is—to get them.
The sun that aroused the cities and villages of the Nile to a

new day, and was already brightening the sky above the melon
fields and grass huts of the Nigerian cultivators, found hunting
parties on the South African veldt already awake and preparing

to take up the pursuit of their game at the point where the same
sun, sinking on the Third Millennium, had interrupted them. A
typical team, no more than four men strong, has been following a

wounded giraffe for three days now. The tracks show clearly
that the animal is weakening, as the poison from their fire-hard­

ened arrows takes effect, and they are gradually regaining the