A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

but the land below is in utter desolation, only the orange sand and black ashes still in the shape of the grass that made them, with here and there the black ashes of leaves fallen off the bushes, or still on their vines, just in the shape of the leaves that made them but black and disintegrating into a pinch of dust when you touch them. And all around are the smoldering great carcasses of fallen trees, burned around the base but the leaves at the tops are still green and the air is filled with the smell of wood burning, and the ground is warm to walk on. And all the little succulents and all the vines that show the water-roots and all the tsama melons are burned, and no snake or lizard is here, all have been burned or gone. We saw two greater kori bustards
[large, grassland birds]
walking, white against the blackened ground. As you walk, black powder rises. My legs are dusted with black up to the knee. But Ukwane, walking along, saw a nest of edible ants—small heaps, brown, exposed because the grass has burned—and he ate some. As he did, the soldier ants swarmed all over him and bit him but he brushed them off.
I ate one too—a bite from the abdomen. You can only eat the large-headed soldier ants. The workers, I am told, are tasteless. But the soldiers taste sour and very watery, very like a blackberry a little on the green side, almost refreshing. Mine opened his jaws wide to fight my thumb before I ate him.
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    Perhaps my favorite memory is of a trance dance. These dances took place at night, and their purpose was usually to exorcise something called “star sickness,” which would often manifest itself as jealousy and other emotions that cause divisions among people, thus compromising everyone’s survival. The songs that people danced to were given to them in dreams, and were meant not to influence any natural feature but to use its power. The rain dance, for example, was meant not to bring rain but to use the power of rain when people could feel it coming. Thus it was the powers of the natural world—the powers of giraffes, elands, rain, the sun, and other features—that united the people, bringing them together by dissolving emotional complexities that threatened to divide them. The strongest power, I believe, was that of the sun. A dance was supposed to start soon after dark and last until sunrise. When the sun’s first flames appeared, the people would use its power and dance the sun dance. Then they’d stop, seemingly relieved and quite happy, and would go back to their shelters to rest for a while.
    A dance almost always took place on the night of a full moon. If the people felt they needed to dance, the men would ask the women to start a dance fire. The women would lay a fire at a distance from the encampment, and when night came, they would light the fire, sit in a circle around it, and begin to sing. The men would join them, to dance in line around the fire, and soon enough some of the men would fall into a trance. In that trance they encountered the spirits of the dead, who were drawn to a dance fire, and also lions (perhaps also drawn to a dance fire, at least to see what was going on), as both kinds of creatures are dangerous. The trancing men would run out into the dark, cursing the spirits and the lions and demanding that they go away. The trancing men would also pull star sickness from the women and from one another and would scream it up to the sky, sending it back to the spirits who brought it. I included the following description in the second book I wrote about the Bushmen,
The Old Way
.
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I remember the first dance that took place after we came, and how I sat in the circle of women at their invitation, not knowing the wordless song, which was complex and had nothing in common with music I knew, and I remember how I was able to keep time by clapping one line of the rhythm, trying to copy the woman next to me. I still remember how it felt when one of the