One of the most treasured moments that I have experienced in my lifetime was sharing an evening sunset in the Kalahari Desert with Margie and our children Miranda and Lochiel.  It was June and the Great Thirst Land had been blessed with good rains. The bountiful season attracted large numbers and many species of ungulates and predators to be observed with awe by keen observers.

 We rested on the grey Kalahari sand of a fossil dry river bed edged by scrubby dunes and woodland in Deception Valley to watch the sun make a spectacular and fiery descent. We were not the only ones here for around us circled a number of inquisitive black-backed jackals. The primordial silence of this remote place was broken only by their mournful quavering cries as they acknowledged our presence.  Further north along the valley floor we had just left a small colony of meerkats on a calcareous pan, sharing their elaborate burrow system with a family of social ground squirrels, overlooked by the hunting presence of a weasel-like slender mongoose.

 From 1974 to 1981, Mark and Delia Owens camped in a small island of stunted flat-topped acacias and ziziphus trees only a few hundred metres from here.  They told a remarkable story of their black-maned lion and brown hyaena research in the best-seller 'Cry Of The Kalahari'. 

It was first described to them as a place 'nobody goes out to much - there's bugger-all there, except miles and miles of bloody Africa!'
The indelible memories of this isolated place instigated the drawing of the 'little people' - Kats of the Kalahari.  We were privileged to have had our children with us.