and their social bonds, hierarchies, and interspecies dynamics became a
source of fascination. Inevitably perhaps, both men began to identify with
them. “They were like people you meet constantly in the street without
knowing their names,” wrote Martin, “and we soon began to look on them
as neighbors.”^16 In essence, this desolate but surprisingly lively maze of
boulder and scrub was a kind of communal umwelt and, in it, Martin and
Korn developed a sense of deep, empathic familiarity with their
cohabitants: “We learnt to recognise their mood and intentions from the
way they held their heads, or set their hooves.^17 We got to understand
them and their behaviour as you get to understand your friends without
the need of speech.... The longer we lived with animals the clearer it
became to us that human and animal behaviour were very closely
related.”^18
Martin was continually impressed by the subtlety of interaction and
awareness he witnessed all around him: rival zebra stallions spelling each
other at the same hole as they pawed away stones to access water; an
ostrich hen spreading her wings to block the progress of other ostriches
after detecting a remote hazard; a baboon dismantling a pair of binoculars
by carefully unscrewing all the component parts; a hyena giving way to a
leopard on the trail and, once the leopard was safely past, shrieking and
yelping after it like a coward hurling insults. “It struck me,” Martin
observed, “that the ‘all too human’ behaviour of men was in reality ‘all
too animal.’ ”
However, Martin’s most surprising discoveries concerned the changes
taking place in his own psyche: when they had first descended into the
canyon, he found that his dreams focused on the people and places he had
left behind. But as the months turned into years, “Animals began to play
an increasing part in them and the distinction between human beings and
animals became blurred.”^19 Martin’s subconscious—his interior umwelt
—was gradually recalibrating itself to match his new, if atavistic, reality.
It was the kind of real-time immersion experiment that psychologists and
anthropologists can only dream of, and it may shed some light on why the
painted caves of southern Europe and the wall art of the Kalahari are so