Lions

Friday, September 2, 2005

The Serengeti is a magnificent place to wake up. The dawn this morning was red and fiery and the most beautiful I've ever seen.

Everybody in our camp were all up shortly after five. Our friends Liz and Jo had to get up even earlier because a jeep (from the lodge we'd seen the night before) picked them up at an ungodly hour to take them on their hot-air balloon ride over the savannah. It sounded like a wonderful experience, soaring over the Serengeti in the fresh early morning, seeing the animals from above. But at the price of $400 US per person for an hour's ride, it was a little too dear for Jeff and I to budget. Throwing in a champagne breakfast once on the ground again is a nice touch, but...no.

As it ultimately turned out, there would have been no room in the balloon for us anyway, and others from our tour who had planned on going were disappointed. I'm glad I didn't have my heart set on it.

As we chased the gorgeous rising sun on our drive this morning, we sometimes caught glimpses of our friends' balloon, floating in the distance along the horizon.

One of the first thing's we saw this morning was a magnificent male lion, posing majestically atop a kopje . He was a truly regal sight, sitting there in the pale dawn light like a living sculture.

The kopjes, rugged rock formations that rise out of the ground here and there like tall stone islands in a yellow sea of grass, were ideal places to spot lions. They made good look-out points for predators to survey their territories.

We spent a good part of the morning carefully circling likely rock formations and keeping our eyes peeled.

The next lions we saw were also males, although these had give up any pretenses to majesty. They were sprawled near one another in the grass, bellies up in the sunshine. Their massive golden paws lazily twitched in the air.The lions occasionally interrupted their nap to scratch themselves, but ignored both our presence and the two giraffes grazing peacefully nearby.

We also came across two lionesses roaming about on the lower slopes of a rocky hill cloaked thickly in vegetation. To our delight, a young cub accompanied them, although it was hard to see its antics as it kept gambolling about behind the bushes.

The most thrilling moment of this trip (and perhaps my life) came when one of the lions threaded its way down to the ground near our truck. She was a beautiful animal, lithe and muscular, and we could tell she was going to come very close to our truck....

All of a sudden the lioness catapaulted through the air towards us! In the blink of an eye, a reedbuck exploded out of the grass, literally right beneath us, and fled down the road in front of us with the lion in hot pursuit.

That moment when I saw the lion's shoulder muscles bunch before she jumped is frozen forever in my mind. Such speed and power! If a human had been her intent and not a deer, that person would not have had time for a full thought before they were caught. Incredible!

None of us noticed the reedbuck before she ran at all. She must have been snugged up right against one of our wheels.

And although most of us had been leaning expectantly out of the open windows with our cameras in hand, not one of us captured a picture of the hunt. It happened much too fast. Although someone's photo captured someone's face in the rear-view mirror with such a wide-eyed and startled expression on it that someone said it could be used in a safari-safety brochure.

The deer got away, by the way. After chasing the zig-zagging animal for a hundred yards or so, the lion gave up, and came trotting back.