These beautiful and timeless stories from the African Bush were gathered more than a century ago and have touched thousands of readers ever since. The South African-born author, Sir Laurens van der Post, revered them and helped to make them known throughout the world. For this special new edition, Gregory McNamee has adapted the original nineteenth-century English translations to create modern versions of the stories for readers without a prior knowledge of the Bushman ways of life. The stories in this book carry universal observations and truths and, with their historical and ethnographic roots in the African Bushman culture, they are fascinating and educational for readers and listeners of all ages. They bear powerful testimony to a desert people living at one with Nature.

A longtime resident of the Southwest, Gregory McNamee is the author of Blue Mountains Far Away and Gila: The Life and Death of an American River, along with numerous other books; he is also the general editor of the Daimon Folklore Library.