Lion Kings

 

Bush babies, rhinos and zebras ... oh my! It must be an African safari.

Sam, our guide, points out that the baby giraffe is still trailing its umbilical cord so it’s just a week old. It has no fear of the topless safari truck we are in and, curious, it totters towards us on long gangly legs. Mum calls it because it stumbles back to her unsteadily and stays at her side. The pair continues nibbling trees.

Sam says this baby is lucky so far, because the lions don’t know about it. If lions moved into the area, it would be dead meat. There is nothing a giraffe family can do to protect the babies from lions for the first couple of months, until they are steady and strong and can run well.

I loathe the lions. They’re so disdainful and arrogant, looking down their noses, shaking their big fluffy manes and growling just because they feel irritable. And I’m scared of them. They roar loudly during the night and, in the African bush where silence is supreme and there’s nothing out but stars, a lion’s roar is terrifying, especially when there’s only canvas between me and it.

I’m on safari in Phinda, a conservation park three hours drive north of Durban in South Africa. Phinda is 20,000 hectares so there is plenty of space for all sorts of animals but, to save the decimation of some species, lion numbers  are carefully monitored and lions are restricted to just three prides. Because they are the jungle kings and have no natural predators, they increase in numbers rapidly but, at Phinda, extra prides, when they pod off, are relocated to other reserves.

Lions are killing machines: fast of feet with razor sharp teeth, jaws like vices and paws with claws made to tear flesh. And, like many royal families, they are not especially kind to each other. They cooperate to hunt but once the prey is captured, competition begins, and the strongest member of the family, usually big daddy, eats first. When he is fat and full, the adult females feed and, finally, the cubs get leftovers.

Although we often hear lions roaring at night, we don’t see any until the third day. Sam drives us to Phinda’s rocky interior and up a flat-top mountain. A fire had been through a couple of years ago and left a canopy of dead trees with blackened, tortured branches. Giant spiky cactus push between rocks and most of the small green trees are acacia with treacherous thorns. Hundreds of vultures, circling high on thermals, keeping an evil eye out for any small thing that moves, add to the weird hellish ambience.

Here, with the help of the miss-nothing eyes of the tracker and lions’ paw prints in dust, we find three adolescent female lions, sisters probably, on the hunt. They are impressive beasts, lean and powerful with taut muscles moving under glossy ginger-brown fur. They have huge paws – all the better to swipe and shred with – and mean little eyes alertly looking here and there. They see a steenbok and the chase is on.

Although other folk get excited about the prospect of seeing a kill, I dread it so I’m hugely relieved when the speedy steenbok loses the lions in undergrowth and they give up the chase.

Sam, who has been working as a ranger for so long he has a sixth sense as to where animals will go, drives off and around and then parks the vehicle at the end of a bush track. The three lionesses, panting slightly from the chase, come out of scrub and pad along the path in single file towards us. They look at the vehicle, and don’t register that it would be easy to kill one of the humans on the open back of it, then turn off into the scrub two metres before the front bumper. And this is as close as I ever want to be to a lion.

Rhinoceros babies are usually safe from the brutal fangs of jungle kings. In the late afternoon, we watch a rhino mum and her funny fat piggy progeny drinking at a waterhole. They are slate grey and hairless except for tail tufts and ear fringes and they are simply enormous. The normal-sized white heron that tiptoes between their dinner-plate-sized feet is tiny by comparison and apparently these beasts grow to weigh over 2,000 kilos. Despite their size, they are fast and agile and have two horns, one behind the other, and the front one, their lethal weapon, grows to be a metre long.

Lions treat rhinos with respect. They know rhinos use their horns with devastating skill and pack a many-tonne punch with their sturdy legs. Rhinos don’t have great sight but have a brilliant sense of sound and smell. Somehow, the mothers always put their massive bodies between their baby and the potential threat until the lions give up and go looking for a safer meal.

Zebra foals are as endearing as any bush babies. They are probably the most bizarre with their precisely painted black and white stripes making them moving op art arrangements. The way the stripes fan out from their tiny black velvet noses, divide around their big coal eyes and join again to merge with the dark inside of their ears is a masterstroke of symmetry and design. Then, a spot of humour, a fuzzy black mohawk mane sits vertical on top of their heads, and swings down the ridge of their necks.

Zebras are social animals and live in herds or smaller harems where a stallion keeps watch over six or seven mares and foals. When wild dogs or hyenas attack, the harem huddles together, with the foals in the middle, while the stallion fights the attackers off. But lions are zebras’ main enemies and a stallion is no match for a pride of lions hunting for a tasty young zebra foal.  Their only defence is to run and, running close, their stripes serve as a camouflage, dazzling the colour-blind lions with a mass of moving stripes, making it difficult for them to precisely pick their prey from the crowd. Zebras have stamina and often outpace lions but, as always, it’s the babies that are vulnerable.

We skip an early morning cuppa and our safari wagon is first on the road. Sam drives into a peach sunrise but, before we have gone a kilometre, we stop to admire three cheetahs, a mum and two cubs. Phinda is proud of its cheetahs. They had been hunted to extinction in the area but when Phinda became a park, and poaching was eliminated, cheetahs were reintroduced and have bred well.

Cheetah mum sits tall and elegant, keeping watch, and the teenage cubs play-fight before stretching sideways and making a floppy pile of long tails and legs. They rest and we watch as the sun rises and paints everything with gold: golden light, golden dry winter grass and gorgeous golden cheetahs decorated with charcoal spots.

Later in the morning, the short wave radio burbles and Sam tells us that a cheetah family have killed nyala (an antelope-type ungulate) on the savannah. We park within spying distance and watch mother cheetah and four adolescents gorging themselves. Their faces are red with blood, we hear them crunching bone and, from time to time, hear them purring. They take turns at eating while one or two of the family sit tall, alert, looking out for lions.

Lions and leopards are their enemies and although cheetahs are faster (they are the fastest land animal and can sprint at up to 100 kilometres per hour) they can’t sustain this speed for long and a pride of lions, taking turns, can run a lone cheetah down. In this instance, lions could simply stroll in and steal their kill.

When a cheetah child is separated from its mother, and it can happen during the fast flurry of hunting lessons, they sit tall and call, making a shrill bird-like chirp. This is a dinner gong to lions on the prowl so, when we head back up the mountain to see if we can spot the three lionesses again, it’s disturbing to see a teenage cheetah sitting tall on a rise and calling for its mother. Dumi tells us he saw this lonesome cat with its family three days ago and, he believes, they are still in the area. So are the three lionesses. It’s a toss of the jungle dice as to which will hear the cry first.

It’s our last night, so, for a touch of luxury, we forego the tents in the bush and stay in Phinda Mountain Lodge. I’m woken, in the dead of night, by a lion’s enraged howl. It’s close, and as I lie and listen, I hear it getting closer. It’s exotically compelling, and terrifying at the same time, to know that just out there, a king killer is close and on the prowl. I’m pleased there is wood, concrete and glass between it and me and not just canvas.

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Stay: &BEYOND is an eco-tourism company that puts profits back into African conservation projects. In Phinda, South Africa, it has four luxury lodges www.andbeyond.com