We were woken at 5am, still without power from last night's storm. A couple of adolescent antelope were outside our lodge having a play fight:
Coffee and on the 'road' - not a touch of tarmac in sight by the way. The sky was perfect, the temperature ideal: cool but by no means cold. And this guy, our tracker
indicates that we should leave the track and we push our way into the bush, taking out trees and shrubs as we go, to sit and watch a splendid male lion resting up, too hidden for good pictures but handsome none the less. We move on some more and then suddenly all hell breaks loose: wild dog.
Lady Luck is with us. You just don't get to see wild dog. And it's a pack. There's a squeal. Our ranger hurls the jeep into the bush and we see an impala taken down by the pack and devoured in about forty seconds. Literally. A second squeal and another kill, just a couple of jeep turns away from us. In two or three minutes we had seen something so far out of the ordinary the ranger reckoned he would not be believed when he told his colleagues: he had never seen a wild dog kill before and the tracker, who has been here ten years, has never seen two. They both seemed as thrilled as we were.
Yum, yum. Attractive chap isn't he, especially after a Big Mac. Actually it was a little one.
So that leaves just black rhino - there's only two in the entire park! - and cheetah.
We remain without power so these two blogs are not going to work quite as I intended because they'll both be published once we're back on line but I wanted to write them now while my heart beat is still racing and the specialness of what we've witnessed is still fresh in my mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment