The Skukuza camp gates at Kruger National Park close at 6:30 p.m.
It was past seven. Tonight I had volunteered to help out with a classmate’s project. He was recording frog calls in rain pools: climbing out of our open Game Drive Vehicle (GDV) and setting cameras by the water to record for 20 minutes in the dark. I held a spotlight to search for the reflection of dangerous animal eyes when we arrived at water.
As we drove on a sand road, a feline shape crossed in front of us, tail between its back legs. A lion? In the spotlight we saw spots and a white tail-tip. A leopard! He walked into the brush near the road. We followed him on a hunt.
A pair of ungulates stood at a bush, eyes reflected in the spotlight. One bolted. The leopard’s eyes were orange and suddenly we saw him chomp—two shrill and desperate cries erupted, and then we saw him carrying the slower steenbok in his mouth. Did we really just see him make a kill?
We were hushed by it and continued to drive to new sites. The Acacias were purple under the moon. At one point we saw something walking up the road and turned off the car and it turned out to be a passing hyena. An hour into the mission, we crossed paths with the other car of students and exchanged tallies.
“We saw lions in the road! And we couldn’t go to pool 17 because a herd of elephants was at it. And we saw the wild dogs again!”
We told them about the hyena and an earlier giraffe and left the leopard kill for last. Then we drove on, around a bend.
Something was lying, belly-forward, in the road. What is that? When we got close, we determined it was a lioness. She was asleep, her head on cushioning paws, and blinked in our headlights. We turned them off and instead put a spotlight on her. She rose to all fours quickly, stretched her neck forward and yawned, her black lips pulled back over her canines. She walked to the side of the open car and faced me. I felt a chill. In a short leap she could be in the seat next to me. My instincts told me that I should curl into a ball in the center floor of the GDV. But then she moved and lay down again, farther from us.
Just up the road, an old male lion was sleeping too. He was thin, his mane narrow and when he took steps his hips dropped in an almost cartoon rhythm. He reminded me of the Tawny-Scrawny Lion from “Little Golden Books” and I asked if he was sick, but my teacher said he thought he was just old. The Tawny-Scrawny Lion sat on his haunches next to the car and looked and me and I experienced none of the primal fear I’d felt when the lioness had stared me down. Mellow and sleepy, he yawned and licked his lips, watched us for a bit and then lay back down in the road away from our spotlight.
Near another pool, we saw a second leopard—close—on the side of the road. It was smaller than the first but more beautiful; rounder cheeks and we could see the white fur on its chin.
Rachna Reddy is a Trinity junior. She is studying ecology in South Africa for the semester. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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