What the Jackals Taught Me About Water

There is an old man in this village who tells people, when they will listen, that the animals were here first and have not forgotten anything. What the jackals taught me about water took a whole summer of sitting out at night to understand, and when I finally understood it I found that the people who built the oldest walls on this land had known it already. This is the piece of knowledge I trust most and can prove least.

What this covers

• What the old man means when he says the ground keeps its water in specific places
• A summer of watching where the jackals dig, and what was under the stones
• Why the oldest terrace walls sit exactly there
• What I can and cannot claim about any of this

The old man

The village calls him various things. I think of him as the Night Jackal, partly because he keeps the hours of one and partly because of what he says about them.

He is not a farmer, or not any longer. He walks at night, he knows the ground the way you know the inside of your own house, and he has a way of answering a practical question with something that sounds like nothing at all until you have carried it around for a season.

I asked him once, in a bad summer, where I should dig a well.

He said: don’t ask the ground where the water is. Ask what drinks.

I found that unhelpful at the time. I was looking for a location and he had given me a riddle. It took me most of the following year to understand that he had in fact given me a method.

The gully

Below the grove there is a cut in the land that has not carried a stream in living memory. By July it is white stones and oleander — the kind of dead-looking place you walk past without a thought.

The jackals do not walk past it. They come down into it at night and they dig.

I had heard them for years without paying attention. That summer, after the riddle, I started sitting on the terrace wall with a torch I never switched on, watching where they went.

It took most of the season to see what I was looking at. They were not digging at random. They dug in the same three or four spots, night after night. Always at the bends, where the gravel was slightly darker and slightly cooler underfoot even at midday.

Under the stones

Eventually I dug one of those spots myself, in daylight, with a spade.

Forty-odd centimetres down the gravel was damp. Not wet enough to pool, nothing you could call a spring, but damp in a way that nothing else on this hillside was in August.

I want to be careful here. I do not know the mechanism. I assume the limestone underneath channels what little water remains and that these bends are where it collects, but I have no way to confirm that and I am not a hydrologist. What I know is what my hand found in the gravel.

The animals had located the last remaining moisture in a system that, to my eyes, had looked completely dry for a decade.

The walls knew first

The part that stopped me was what came next.

The oldest terrace walls on this land — the ones nobody now living built, that were already old when my grandfather was young — sit exactly along those same bends.

Whoever built them was reading the ground the same way the jackals read it now. Not by what shows on the surface, but by where the land quietly refuses to give up its last water. They had no instruments and no word for hydrology. They had generations of watching, and they put the walls where the water was.

The modern version of it has a name and a set of drawings — swales and berms, laid on the contour to catch water and hold it long enough to sink. It is the same idea, arrived at independently, several generations later.

I told the old man. He was not surprised, which annoyed me slightly.

He said something to the effect that everyone who lasted here read the ground that way, and the ones who did not read it did not last, and that this is the only reason any knowledge survives at all — not because it was written down, but because the people holding the wrong version of it left.

What this actually gave me

It gave me a method, and the method is the transferable part.

Watch what drinks. Not just jackals. Where the vegetation stays green two weeks longer. Where the ground is cooler underfoot at midday. Where the insects concentrate at dusk. Where an animal chooses to lie down in August.

These are all instruments, and they are free, and they integrate conditions over a whole season in a way that a single soil test never will.

I have used it since. When I mapped my food forest after the 2023 drought, I was doing the same thing in a different form — reading which trees had survived to find out where the water actually was. The jackals had shown me the principle; the drought applied it at scale and cost me a hundred and twenty trees to learn it properly.

What I keep from this

• The ground does not distribute its water evenly; it concentrates it in specific places
• Those places can be read from the surface, but not by looking at the surface directly
• Animals and vegetation integrate a whole season’s conditions; a measurement does not
• The people who built the old walls had already solved this, and left no explanation
• I cannot tell you the mechanism, only what my hand found in the gravel

Questions people ask

Is this a reliable way to find water? It is a reliable way to find where moisture concentrates, which is not the same as finding a water source. I would not site a well on it. I would, and do, site trees on it.

How long did it take to see the pattern? Most of one summer of sitting out at night, and I nearly gave it up twice. Nothing was obvious until I had watched the same spots enough times to know they were the same spots.

Can you do this without jackals? The animal is not the point. Anything that has to find water in August will show you where it is. Vegetation does it more slowly and more visibly than any animal, and you can read it in daylight.

Do you actually believe the old man’s version of it? I do not know what I believe about most of what he says. What I can report is that following his instruction produced a result I could dig up with a spade, and that is more than most advice has done for me.

Related reading

• Building a Dry Stone Terrace — the walls that were already sitting where the water is
• Rainwater Harvesting with Swales and Berms — putting the same reading of the ground to deliberate use

Before you go

I send one letter a month from this hillside — what was tried, what failed, and what the season is doing. No schedules, no promises about yields.