During the dry months, hunters chase game—antelope, wild pigs, monkeys, elephants—running from the bush fires, while women scan the burnt ground for escaped rodents. The blackened earth, later, unfurls tender fern shoots that young girls gather—a middrought treat. A solitary tree stands out, its hard-shelled yellow fruits hanging like bright bulbs. Grasshoppers leap between the dried stalks fringing the village; the children spring after them, catching and roasting them as an afternoon snack.

In the rainy season, the plains grow lush again with an abundant green. The fields, so strenuously cleared and planted by the women, yield corn, beans, squash, manioc, sweet potatoes, and an assortment of spinachlike greens. The rivers overflow. Animals grow fatter. Throughout the long, torrential rains, the bush offers fish, fowl, and game to those who trap and chase.

Living within a seemingly endless plain, the Chokwe villagers move, think, and breathe the bush—its moist or smoky air, its rising and descending hills, its alternating wet, then dry, skies and grass. The bush surrounds and sustains them. Every day, the village empties at dawn: Except for the aged and frail, who stay home, all able-bodied men, women, and children work and claim their food from the bush. They return in the late afternoon with heavy baskets filled with “dinner”—most frequently game, manioc roots, and greens.

Telling bush lore

After work in the afternoons, people rest in the village shade; reclining against a tree or a hut’s wall or sitting in the kitchen, they avidly recount the day’s events. Later in the evening, after dinner, families and neighbors gather by the backyard fires and sometimes tell stories. Thus, much of the time, villagers either work in the bush or talk and tell stories about it; and so, those real events and story scenes and figures tend to merge in their awareness.