I once spent a few days in the Sabi Sands Game Reserve near Kruger Park. I stayed at a luxury lodge that shall remain nameless, due to an ongoing legal dispute involving some missing hotel towels. I won’t go into it in too much depth now, but I maintain that the “˜reasonable safari lodge’ would not want to keep towels that have been soaked in vodka to sterilize them after contamination with trace elements of warthog blood.
Anyhow, the real story starts at the beginning of an evening game drive. I was unfortunate enough to get assigned to the vehicle with the Canadian family. Two parents, three kids. A lot of gear and clothing. A lot of “˜interest in learning’. As we set off I could already anticipate the future awkwardness that would occur when I would be forced to reprimand one of the children. I just hoped it would not have to be physically.
Not long into the drive, but after darkness had truly settled in the bush, the radio crackled. One word kept being repeated: “Ingwe” – Leopard. A sense of excitement gripped me. I sensed that it had also gripped the Canadians, and much to my displeasure the middle boy started to list off encyclopaedic facts about leopards to his enthralled audience. I turned around and noticed now that he had some type of facial defect. Disappointingly this meant it would be far harder to reprimand him. He probably knew this and was using it to his advantage. “Clever guy, huh?”, daddy said to me loudly, with a large, North American grin on his face. I snorted and turned away.
We crunched and crackled gently through the bush, and eventually pulled to a stop. As soon as the engine flicked off we could hear the gentle rumble of a sibling Land Cruiser close by. After a little more radio communication the other vehicle used their torch to signal to us, and we found a way around a tight thicket of shrubs to our destination.
I have never seen anything really fight before except high school jocks and on one occasion a Moroccan teenager and an enraged mountain goat. Neither was as exhilarating as this. A mother leopard sat on top of a termite mound, her male, adolescent offspring crouched below her. Both of their lips were crudely pulled back, their eyes and noses wrinkled with pure aggression. The harsh light of the halogen spotlights shaped every rippling muscle crisply. A fully-grown female leopard might be about the size of a Labrador, but that is where the similarity ends. A leopard is to a Labrador like a soft, overweight, pale English tourist on a Thai beach is to Mike Tyson.
The air felt literally electric, with the two leopards seemingly unaware of anything at all other than their fixation on each other. The constant rumbling growls were punctuated with blood curdling screeches. Our vehicle was positioned about two metres from the termite mound, which itself stood about three metres tall. Whilst I was thankful that the nearest potential victim for Mama Leopard was Mama Canada rather than myself, I would have rather one of her offspring be taken if it came down to it. Mama Canada appeared to house a fairly petite and athletic body beneath the layer of binoculars, Yellow fleeces and sown-on Canadian flag badges.
In all honesty the apparent risk of the situation started to affect me adversely. As I stared, transfixed at the taut body of Mama Leopard I could feel my heart pounding at the top of my chest. I started to see spots. It took me a full twenty seconds to realize that the spots actually belonged to the leopard, rather than my hallucinating mind.
Our guide whispered a narrative to us as the pair of fighters edged back and forth, salivating and clawing at the dirt. Apparently this mighty duel happens every time a young leopard becomes old enough to go and seek its fortune. The youngster often doesn’t want to leave the safe and familiar territory of its mother, and has to be forced out under threat of extreme violence. It was after learning this that I felt an overwhelming sensation of empathy for the leopard child, having experienced very similar domestic tensions myself.
The guide’s monologue was suddenly interrupted by a high-pitched, feminine shriek. I swung around, ready to fling the obnoxious child into the path of the pouncing leopard as a decoy. In fact it was he that had let out the shriek (which I gloated at secretly), as Mama Leopard had leapt down to her son. He drew back, hissing like a boiling kettle. She jabbed out with a left, catching him on the nose. The bristling energy of the mother was almost arousing, and I tried to catch the eye of Mama Canada to see if we were universally attuned to some kind of animalistic passion. Alas not – she was instead filming everything on a camcorder the size of a credit card, watching the entire show through a two-inch pixelated screen.
Another quick scuffle ensued, with Mama yet again getting the jump on her son, this time with a powerful right hook which sent him reeling and whining with frustration. Her dominance was clear, and he slowly retreated with his tail literally between his legs. It took a few minutes for the adrenaline to work its way through my system. When my arousal had diminished I turned to the Canadians to make some meaningless small talk and although it was hard to tell due to the inky darkness I saw something which filled me with joy. A small patch of dampness was spreading on the obnoxious child’s trousers. I cackled to myself silently. Who’s the clever guy now? Huh?
Photograph courtesy of Andrew Bovingdon.
