Jack Bousfield was a legend in Africa, a fourth-generation white hunter who had guided Clark Gable, Lee Radziwill, and Ernest Hemingway, among a dozen others. He had been gored by a rogue elephant and claimed to have shot 53,000 crocodiles. But sometime in the 1960s, he traded his gun for a camera. By the early 70s, he was looking for a base to put down roots. When he suggested building a safari camp on the edge of the Makgadikgadi salt pans in the Kalahari, Botswana, everyone said he was mad.
But when Bousfield came to the Kalahari, he fell in love with the place: the long horizons, the vast bowl of sky, the grasslands rimmed with salt flats, and the palm trees on the horizon like feathery quill ends. He built his safari camp by a huge camel-thorn tree and called it Bushman Bed Camp. His neighbors were the Khoisan, a group of Indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa, sometimes known as the San.