I love Thanksgiving.  That’s the day we recall an archetypal feast our Puritan ancestors and the indigenous Indian tribe — the Wampanoag — celebrate by feasting, expressing thankfulness for surviving a severe winter.  Thanksgiving is perhaps the least commercialized of all our Holy Days – holidays.  Food, family, football.  Everyone brings his or her own favorite dish.  There is a kind of quiet competition as to who can make the best casserole or bake the best pie.  The fine china, the sparkling crystal, and the shiny silverware that lie dormant the other 364 days of the years proudly perch atop a fine cherry table, also a relic, seldom sat around.  A prayer, perhaps, is uttered.  Or muttered.  And then family and friends are seated.  The ritual begins.  A cornucopia of plenty.  The stuffed turkey soon stuffs us.  Casseroles galore.  Not a dessert  deserted.  Always room for more and more until the tryptophan-laced turkey renders us incapable of even remembering the thankful part of Thanksgiving.  And despite the piles of leftovers that will provide good eats for at least a week, somehow the food, the full bellies, the day, Thanksgiving Day, can make us only happy but never content.

Recently my wife and I went on our second safari to Tanzania for twelve glorious days.  On the third day we were there, I elected to go hunting with the Hadzabe tribe.  The Hadza people are one of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on earth.  The women gather; the men hunt.  They live in the skins of the animals they kill and eat in order to survive.  I accompanied three Hadzabe, two boys and a twenty something on a hunt.  We walked up a small hill strewn with volcanic rocks.  The hunters carried their handmade bows and arrows with them.  My guide and translator Elliot became separated from the hunters.  We remained quiet while the Hadza hunted.  I noticed that on our way through the brush, a thorn from an acacia tree had become embedded in my right forearm.  It was bleeding.  Elliot reached out for an oval shaped leaf on a shrub an arm’s length away and placed it on my wound.  Instantly, the bleeding was staunched.  Then he walked ten or fifteen feet to a small tree.   With his forefinger he rubbed the bark of the tree until a thick unguent, the consistency of Vaseline, formed.  He rubbed the ointment into my wound.  “An antibiotic,” he said. Whatever it was, the cut healed very quickly without an infection.  Herbal medicine a quarter of a mile from the Hadza camp.  They emerged from a thicket with their kill.  The twenty year old held a dove before him, the small boy, a small yellow bird.  I told Elliot to tell the boy proudly bearing the small yellow bird upon his beaming smile, “That’s not enough to feed a two year old.”  Translation.   Silence.  The boy speaks.  And smiles.  Elliot smiles.  The translation, “It’s enough.”

Written & photo by George Harwood (Athens, Georgia)
Travelled with Avid Safari in February 2025