“There isn’t an ordinary telephone at the camp,” said Hansi. “They have a satellite phone, I think, but they usually use the radio. But you can speak to their office in Maun. They can get in touch with them.”

She asked about the camp, and he gave her further details. He had been there once himself, on a trip that the owners of the camp had organised for tour agents. “I have never been so comfortable in my life,” he said. “Never. And they were very good to us.”

“I have heard as much,” said Mma Ramotswe. “There was a certain Mrs. Grant who also thought that.”

“I met the manager,” Hansi went on. “I am sure that he will help you in your inquiry, whatever it is. And I also know one of the guides there. He is a very good man. He is called Mighty, and he can look at the ground and tell you about all the animals that have passed that way since, oh, five days ago. He reads the ground like a book. If he saw your footprints he would say, Lady of …”

“Of traditional build,” supplied Mma Ramotswe.

“Exactly. Lady of traditional build. She went by here five hours ago. Heading north.”

“They are very clever, those people, Hansi.”

Hansi nodded. “Sometimes I worry, though. I worry about who will be learning those skills in the next generation. Are there apprentices? Are there people learning how to track?”

Mma Ramotswe frowned as she thought of the apprentices at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. She could not imagine Charlie and Fanwell tracking animals through the bush, although she could just see them tracking cars. Four-door saloon, heading south, third gear. Or, more likely, Car full of girls, going that way, two hours ago.

Hansi made tea, and they continued to chat for half an hour or so. They enjoyed each other’s company, although their circumstances were very different. He came from the opposite end of the country, from Ghanzi, in the far west, on the other side of the Kalahari, a dry place that had just enough vegetation to make it good land for cattle, as long as they were grazed thinly enough on the brittle veld. It was a landscape of browns and ochres, of dust and copper-red sunsets, of rickety windmills turning above marginal boreholes, sucking the land for water somewhere deep down.