With the baboon skull still in the fire, Onwas rises to his feet and claps his hands and begins to speak. It's a giraffe-hunting story—Onwas's favorite kind. I know this even though Mariamu, my translator, is not next to me. I know because Onwas, like many Hadza, is a story performer. There are no televisions or board games or books in Onwas's camp. But there is entertainment. The women sing songs. And the men tell campfire stories, the Kabuki of the bush.

Onwas elongates his neck and moves around on all fours when he's playing the part of the giraffe. He jumps and ducks and pantomimes shooting a bow when he's illustrating his own role. Arrows whoosh. Beasts roar. Children run to the fire and stand around, listening intently; this is their schooling. The story ends with a dead giraffe—and as a finale, a call and response.

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas, holding out his hands.

"Yes!" shouts the group. "You are a man."

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas again, louder.

"Yes!" shouts the group, their voices also louder. "You are a man!"

Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.

The baboon hunt, it seems, was something of an initiation for me. The next day, Nyudu hacks down a thick branch from a mutateko tree, then carefully carves a bow for me, long and gracefully curved. Several other men make me arrows. Onwas presents me with a pipe. Nkulu handles my shooting lessons. I begin to carry my bow and arrows and pipe with me wherever I go (along with my water-purification kit, my sunscreen, my bug spray, and my eyeglass-cleaning cloth).

I am also invited to bathe with the men. We walk to a shallow, muddy hole—more of a large puddle, with lumps of cow manure bobbing about—and remove our clothes. Handfuls of mud are rubbed against the skin as an exfoliant, and we splash ourselves clean. While Hadza have a word for body odor, the men tell me that they prefer their women not to bathe—the longer they go between baths, they say, the more attractive they are. Nduku, my Hadza language teacher, said she sometimes waits months between baths, though she can't understand why her husband wants her that way. I also discover, by listening to Mille and Onwas, that bickering with one's spouse is probably a universal human trait. "Isn't it your turn to fetch water?" "Why are you napping instead of hunting?" "Can you explain why the last animal brought to camp was skinned so poorly?" It occurs to me that these same arguments, in this same valley, have been taking place for thousands of years.