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

The Search

"Do you see leopards?" Mary asked.

"We do see leopards," said Richard Chulu, the camp guide.

Mary had first asked the question after we saw our first lion - stretched out in the shade of wild fig tree beside a watering hole, calm and unconcerned. He raised his head and lolled back into a bed of grass. Andy Hogg, director of the Bushcamp Company, had driven us by jeep from Mfuwe airport and turned off the dirt road just inside the national park to this watering hole, quite low in August. Andy said the lion had gorged on a zebra kill two days ago.
The lion's stomach was stretched far too wide, and he panted like a dog after chasing a deer on a hot day. Three hours ago I had been in Lusaka, three days ago in New York City, now 30 minutes inside South Luangwa National Park and a huge brown-maned lion lay feet from me digesting his dinner.
"There are more leopards per square kilometer here than anywhere in Africa," Andy told Mary later on the veranda of Mfuwe Lodge before we headed out to Kuyenda Camp. We had stopped for cold drinks after the beating sun and dust of the open jeep. The wooden deck at the lodge looked out over a lagoon, shrunk in the dry season exposing broad mud flats where yellow baboons dug grubs and jostled raucously for territory. "I don't want to put the jinx on you, though, and say you will see leopard."

Andy, 38, has a look that seems to draw from deep within where he stores up the extraordinary wildness and wonder of the creatures he sees around him daily. He led game hunts before he turned to game viewing and he displays a quiet thankfulness - a quality shared by his bushcamp guides - for the privilege of working in this rare place, so very far from the squeezed and stressed modern world.

Lotti drove us from Mfuwe Lodge by jeep to Kuyenda, which means walking safari in Kunda, the local language in a nation where 73 different tribes each have their own tongue. For Europeans, the word safari conjures up the exotic of a bygone era, the big-game adventure done in a grand style. It comes from the Swahili for journey or travel, but the word for me became far more than that -- a spiritual journey, a going to the root of things, of discovering passions and rawness, and finding freedom, beauty and death.

Dust splayed out from the orange-red gravel road and coated the bushes. Two months were left before the rains begin in November, and it is a skeletal landscape in the height of the dry season. Mopane trees are shaking off their fading camouflage-green and yellowing leaves. Tall grasses have turned to straw, trampled and chewed to the base. The sucked-out earth is taut as a drum. Gray mud from the riverbeds is cracked into hexagonal shapes and the gullies and culverts and tributaries feeding into the great, wide, meandering Luangwa River are parched.

The heat was easing and the late afternoon light was warming the browns of the desiccated earth into ochres and coppers and golds and russets.

Suddenly from a grove of trees an elephant came lumbering into the path. It arced its trunk from left to right, sampling for smells, its huge ears flapping This was a male teenager separated from its mother and sibling on the opposite side of the path and not quite ready to leave its matriarchal grouping to graze the 9,050 square kilometers of South Luangwa National Park alone or to join a bachelor group. Then it would only return to a herd when the smell of musk streaked down the face of a female, staining her face with tears at oestrus to attract a mate.


Now, nearing 5 p.m. in the afternoon and the sun sliding before we had even reached Kuyenda Camp, this young bull might not be ready to leave his mother's orbit but was certainly ready to test its muscle on us.

The elephant snorted, spread its ears, extended its trunk and with a trumpeting roar, it charged. It halted feet from the truck and pawed the ground, stirring up a dust cloud. Notti edged the truck back a little. A bull elephant charging at up to 45 kilometers an hour and standing up to 12 feet tall, weighing 6,000 kilograms is a killing machine.

The elephant charged a second time. Notti revved the truck's engine and revved it again, turning it into a snorting, roaring, grinding metallic machine that was king of the bush and more brutish than this young bull. The elephant halted, backed off and ambled across the road, trunk swaying, padding, padding quietly on its cushioned feet and melted away into the white thorn bush as if it were never there.

I let in air and breathed again. Mary and I looked at each other, the shock and the thrill mixing on our faces. "I would rather leave this earth being charged by an elephant than to die in a nursing home," Mary said.

That was how our safari began.
 

[continued...The Sounds]