The notebooks, and the reason for them.

I am from Thailand. I started hunting elephant at fifty-two, at an age when my friend Mr. Kai-Uwe Denker — who had inspired me to come to Nyae Nyae in the first place — was stopping, because he felt elephant hunting was a sport for younger people. I took the opposite view: I felt I would not be able to walk far if I got any older, and if I was going to walk up an old-age bull elephant on foot I had better start at once.

Between 2012 and 2015 I hunted and fished across Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, the United States, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, India, Australia, Mexico and France. The long-form material on this site is mostly Nyae Nyae because that is where the best notes survive. The photo-essays are drawn from what the rest of the archive still remembers.

These pages are a private field record. They are published here because the era they document has begun to close — Felix is gone, the Nyae Nyae concession has moved through several operators, and the global politics of trophy hunting have shifted sharply. Whatever one thinks of that politics, the primary-source account of what regulated, community-owned conservation hunting actually looked like on the ground, day by day, seems worth keeping in the open.

I am grateful to Felix Marnewecke, to Florian Huettner, to the trackers Xhau, Robert and Cache, to the Ju/'hoansi of Nyae Nyae, and to everyone who sat around a fire and let me write it down afterwards.