#832: The Return of The Lion Tracker — Boyd Varty on The Wild Man Within, Nature’s Hidden Wisdom, and How to Feel Fully Alive

Could a baboon, a kudu and a week of silence teach you how to live?

That sounds ridiculous. Then you'll meet Boyd Varty, and it starts to make sense. He speaks like someone who has both scraped his knuckles on a Land Rover and slept under a sky full of stars until his ideas rearranged themselves. What he brings back from the bush is not just wildlife lore. It's a set of practices that quietly push against how most of us structure attention, leadership and recovery.

From firefighting drills to energetic jujitsu

One of the sharper scenes he recounts is almost comic until it isn't: a mock fire, a kinked hose, a heroic French-foreign-legion cadence, and a hose that behaves like an anaconda. The result is chaos. But Boyd's takeaway is surgical — when panic spikes, the rare skill is to bring energy down rather than shout louder. I found myself scribbling that line: energetic jujitsu. It's deceptively simple and immediately usable.

I was surprised by how unglamorous the lesson felt in practice. Slowing your voice and actions isn't mystical. It's tactical. It deflates ego and buys time for better decisions.

Silence, story-hunting and the natural state

Boyd treats the bush as a radically efficient storytelling engine. He argues that nature gives you back something modern life gradually strips away: a nonverbal, first-language awareness. When guests arrive at his retreats, he often begins with silence. No phones. No analysis. The quiet allows perception to sharpen — not because of a spiritual pep talk, but because brains are freed of a constant “need to know.”

What really caught my attention was how quickly small acts — waking with dawn, removing digital friction, listening to bird calls — shift chemistry and mood. Guests start reporting surprising clarity within twenty-four hours. I left that section thinking: what if two hours a week of curated interruption-free time produced the same qualitative uptick as a weekend of frantic productivity?

Persistence hunting and the anthropology of attention

Then comes the part that reads like a primal epic: joining Bushmen trackers on a persistence hunt. Picture running in desert heat, following a kudu's tracks for hours, temperature near 47°C, and a group rhythm that is at once athletic and ceremonial. The animal tires; the hunters do not. The payoff is both practical — food — and symbolic: the group taps into an archetypal current of attention and humility.

I was uncomfortable and invigorated by this at once. It's a reminder that some human skills — the ones that stitch body, environment and community — are learned through hardship and shared risk. Modern fitness apps don't typically train you for that sort of interdependence.

Lunch the baboon and the theater of unpredictability

If you need proof that wildlife refuses to be aestheticized, read the Lunch story. A baboon wanders into a suite, guzzles papaya hand lotion, covers the room in a tableau that could be a stage set for chaos, then launches himself like a rocket off a veranda. The cleanup becomes a masterpiece of improvisation and discretion when a visiting prince is moments away from arrival.

I laughed, then winced. There is a human humility in the staff's response: they postpone a royal bouquet in favor of a hippo sighting, buy time, and present a pristine room. The anecdote is a sly lesson in crisis management, theatre and practical grace.

Wildness as access, not escape

Boyd's most persuasive claim is modest: wildness is not an escape hatch. It's a grammar for attention. The point is to come back with a different operating system. He likes the phrase "follow the non-rational energy" — little bodily upticks that point toward something alive. That felt oddly familiar. It reminded me of friends who choose hard parenting or coaching work not because it's restful, but because it builds perceptual muscles.

He also argues that men regain available emotional range best together, often outside the trappings of polished conversation. Campfires, shared toil and the pretext of a hunt create an environment where tenderness and ferocity can both be practiced without theatricality. I found that idea humane and quietly radical.

Practical residue — what you can take home

• Make silence practical: a single morning, phone-free, can recalibrate a week's worth of distracted decisions.
• Practice energy downshifts: rehearse a short, soft voice and slow gesture to defuse escalating moments.
• Use the group as a sensing tool: trusted peers can mirror blind spots faster than solitary work.

By the end, I was left thinking about small, stubborn changes: wake with light, sleep with darkness, take company calls from a chair rather than a treadmill, and make time for friend-anchored, non-goal activities. The bush doesn't promise answers. It restores a field where the right questions arise. That felt less like a retreat pitch and more like an invitation to live with slightly better equipment.

The reflective question that stayed with me: what if the antidote to modern overwhelm is less strategy and more skillful quiet?