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

Stalking

I slept in and was astonished Mary did not wake me when two lions came drinking at the water's edge.
"We'll take the canoe over the river and find them," said Chris. He pushed the deep, narrow, green boat into the current and his assistant Isaiah poled hard. Hippopotamuses snorted and hurrumphed upstream at a safe distance and there were no crocodiles in sight - a relief in my bleary slept-in, half-awake state. Isaiah glided the canoe onto a beach washed pink and gray in the early morning light.

Their footprints were easy to find, broad and shallow in the dry sand and deep and firm in the gray mud - five fingers, claws retracted and three pads clustered in a diamond at back. They led across the wide beach to a well-worn breach in the riverbank where I'd watched elephants climb last night.
"Buffalo," Isaiah said. Dark brown cow pads about eight inches in diameter marked one of the maze of criss-crossing animal trails that led into the scrubland. The lion prints followed the buffalo droppings.

Lions work in teams to bring down an animal as large as a buffalo, gorge on it and then rest for days to digest. At the end of the trip from Mfuwe Lodge I was to see a herd of five hundred or more buffalo at night, and half a mile away two lionesses stalking the young and the stragglers coming up the riverbank.
Isaiah lost the trail. It was an animal thoroughfare of buffalo, elephant, impala prints and droppings everywhere. Instead, we took the riverbank west pushing through tall grasses and bush, until Isaiah and Chris stopped. They heard the single bark of a baboon. To Mary and my untrained ear, we heard nothing. Chris and Isaiah led the way and we retraced our footsteps, crouching through bare bushes and stubby trees. Anticipation, adrenaline running high, eyes wide open, watching, not knowing what to expect and when.

The grasses were all grazed away here and it was brown and used-up land. Through the undergrowth of vines and brush, I saw two legs, then four - tawny, almost the same color as the surroundings. A tail with a tufty black end swished. A brown mane encircled a broad head. Its eyes were narrowed, surveying, and it paced up and down, cautious, wary.

I was 20 yards away. We had tracked down a lion in the bush.


[continued...Chindeni Camp - The Senses]