1. The Search
2. The Sounds
3. Walk at Sunrise
4. Chamilandu Camp
5. Stalking
6. Chindeni Camp - The Senses
7. Snorting
8. Tastes
9. The Sighting and a Bush Breakfast

Chindeni Camp - The Senses

Forest green canvas tents built on platforms with decks overlooking the lagoon.

I thought I loved Kuyenda -- yellow and gold and hot. But now Chindeni is capturing me. It is so green here, cooler too, the lagoon feeds the Nile cabbage, ebony and mahogany trees on the water's edge and the tents pitched between them.

The green of the canvas tents intensifies the feeling of deep in the woods that I know well from camping in the Adirondak Mountains of New York.

Debs Tittle, the guide at Chindeni, has a slow, smooth, loose-limbed walk that follows the gait of the animals, a mindful way of walking. We are standing on the little deck built just below the dining area between the trees and looking over the lagoon, and I think of her walk as we watch a Thornicraft giraffe wandering leisurely down to the water's edge, eyes roving. It waits and watches, assesses, dips its head a little, eyes scanning, and waits. "I watched a giraffe take 20 minutes to lower its head to drink," Debs said.

It is watching for predators, ever careful that this most important act of taking water does not become its moment of vulnerability. It lowers each vertebra, stage by stage,
splays its legs and sips and shakes its loose lips and sips.

"I love those lips," she said.

Debs has that same careful, way of walking - pared down, nothing extraneous. She used it circling elephants this morning. We ambled through the dry riverbed to the bank where giraffe ate the tops off white thorn bush trees by bending back the barbs with their tongues. Walking through the bush is a lesson in dependence, co-existence and survival. It is also an unlayering. Debs stops and plucks a waxy green leaf. Mapped onto it is the life cycle of a moth. "This is where it entered," she says, tracing a mauve, swirly pattern across the leaf with her finger. "Here's where the parasite ate its way through, and gets bigger and bigger, and then here is where the pupae pops out. " She smiles, delighted by the compactness of the story. We stepped single file through a field of cracked dry mud into yellowed grass, very quiet. Debs exchanged glances with her scout James. She motioned the troop of six of us to stay close and circle a stand of trees. Elephants were behind us, in front us and beside us, stripping leaves from the bushes.

We edged around the bushes staying upwind. For over half an hour, we crept around the bushes. A young elephant stuck close to its mother. A teenager lingered on the edges of the group. All the time the elephants, though wary of their territory, never knew we were there.

To be able to walk amid these wild animals and not disrupt their behavior, nor disturb them, is why to come here. It sends chills up the spine. Of civets and genets and things The guests who left Chindeni as we arrived said on their night drive they had followed a leopard hunting impala. It did not catch one.

Debs cuts the engine to the jeep and sits and watches in the steely light of a nearly full moon. Shadows are long over the lagoon. James sweeps the spotlight along the culverts and gullies flushing out the shadows where leopards crouch. We listen and watch. These are the best moments, soaking it in through the pores, every sense alert and waiting for the wildlife to unfold. I love the still and want it to last and last. Debs conveys an attunement with her surroundings like no other guide. That is why she is a top guide in the park - rare for a woman. It is her ability to be completely at one with the environment.

James' beam catches at the base of a tree a low cat-like creature, light yellow and black. My heart races. It slides behind the trunk of the tree. James scans the halo of light over the branches. In my mind's eye I have seen so many times the leopard that will sit on those low branches. The beam catches a small fast-moving thing and then a striped tail. It is a genet, about the size of a long house cat and mimicking some of the colors of a leopard. It is very shy and hides well in the foliage, but for its tail. It moves quickly to the highest branches and hides. We see seven that night.

We move on. The night is darkening, a cloud dulls the moonlight. A night breeze picks up, cool off the river and down from the hills. Debs winds a moss green striped cloth shawl about her neck. I draw a blanket around my knees in the jacked-up seat in the back of the jeep. Mary has her video camera set up ready on a tripod. James' beam catches a round glowing red light bulb, two of them, in the branches of a tree. "Bush baby," said Debs. Small and shy, they are hard to see. We see several of them, at least their eyes, big and vulnerable caught trapped in the glare. A large eye helps animals see at night, and they reflect back round and huge.

Another stirring near the base of trees and a flash of tail. This one is dark with white shading - a white-tailed mongoose scurrying into the grasses, not waiting to be watched. It is only the herds of impala and puku that stand immobile in the dark, watching and listening. Even the zebra hurry away.

After a time, you get to recognize the animals by the height of the glint of their eyes and the color that reflects back. Lying in the gravelly road we see a ruby red shape shining, and then fluttering in the headlamps. I got to easily recognize the nighthawk.

There was no leopard tonight.



[continued...Snorting]