THE ELEPHANT BREATHED its last some five miles from the sand track that snaked its way between the small Ju/’hoansi Bushmen villages of G/aqo!oma and Denu/ui in the Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. This area lies adjacent to Namibia’s border with Botswana, north-west of the vast, semi-arid Kalahari Desert that dominates much of central southern Africa.

When this particular hunt took place I had already been documenting the Ju/’hoansi’s often traumatic encounter with the rapidly expanding global economy for twenty-five years. Over this period, I had followed numerous hunts. But this time the hunters were not Ju/’hoansi. Nor did they use traditional poison-tipped reed-shafted arrows or small, stiff bows fashioned from grewia wood. This time the hunters were a middle-aged married couple from Austria: he a dentist and she the manager of their dental practice back in Vienna. They had paid in the region of US$80,000 to kill this elephant and had done so using custom-built large-calibre rifles.