When it comes to mentors, you can’t beat survival; just trying to fill his belly every day and avoidpissing off, for instance, two black-backed jackals mating beneath a baobob was an excellent wayfor Louis to begin of a master tracker. He learned to look at piles of zebradung and distinguish which droppings came from which animal; intestines, he discovered, haveridges and grooves that leave unique patterns on feces. Learn to tell them apart, and you can singleout a zebra from an exploding herd and track it for days by its distinctive droppings. Louis learnedto hunch over a set of fox tracks and re-create exactly what it was doing: here, it was movingslowly as it scented around for mice and scorpions, and look, that’s where it trotted off withsomething in its mouth. A swirl of swept dirt told him where an ostrich had taken a dust bath, andlet him backtrack to find its eggs. Meerkats make their warrens in hard-pan, so why were theydigging here in soft sand? Must mean there’s a den of tasty scorpions….

Even after you learn to read dirt, you ain’t learned nothing; the next level is tracking withouttracks, a higher state of reasoning known in the lit as “speculative hunting.” The only way you canpull it off, Louis discovered, was by projecting yourself out of the present and into the future,transporting yourself into the mind of the animal you’re tracking. Once you learn to think likeanother creature, you can anticipate what it will do and react before it ever acts. If that sounds alittle Hollywood, then you’ve seen your share of movies about impossibly clairvoyant FBIprofilers who can “see with the eyes of a killer.” But out there on the Kalahari plains, mind-throwing was a very real and potentially deadly talent.

“When tracking an animal, one attempts to think like an animal in order to predict where it isgoing,” Louis says. “Looking at its tracks, one visualizes the motion of the animal and feels thatmotion in one’s own body. You go into a trancelike state, the concentration is so intense. It’sactually quite dangerous, because you become numb to your own body and can keep pushingyourself until you collapse.”