Still no giraffe. Four of us had been walking half the day, tracking a wounded giraffe that Mwasad, a Hadza man in his late 30s, shot the evening before. He hit it in the base of the neck from about 25 yards with a steel-tipped, wood arrow smeared with powerful, homemade poison. Hadza are traditional hunter-gatherers who live off of wild plants and animals in the dry savanna wilderness of northern Tanzania. They know the landscape and its residents better than you know your local Trader Joe's. Mwasad had let the giraffe run to give the poison time to work, hoping to find it dead in the morning. An animal that size would feed his family and his camp for a week—but only if he could locate it.
