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Simon Barnes
ROGUE LION SAFARIS
For Bob, Jess and Manny with grateful thanks; for CLW with eternal gratitude.
It is customary on these occasions to make some kind of disclaimer: I would like to begin by doing the opposite. The geography and ecology of Mchindeni National Park is based on a real park Somewhere In Africa; every observation of wildlife and every interaction between wildlife and people come from my own notebooks. The single exception is based meticulously on a personally communicated eye-witness report. However, the politics and the administration of the park are entirely fictional, as are all the human characters to be found there. I would also like to acknowledge the most frequently used reference material: The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations by George B. Schaller, Portraits in the Wild by Cynthia Moss, Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa by Gordon Lindsay Maclean and the bird-sound recordings of Baron Robert Stjernstedt.
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George Sorensen, ectomorphic, myopic, leotropic, pointed to the crown of an umbrella thorn, where three vultures sat waiting.
‘Lion?’ he asked, but with George, questions were often really statements. Lion: for sure: and I knew George would want to move in. Dread and delight, familiar fellows, gripped me again.
George pointed a courteous finger skyward, and said to Helen: ‘Striped kingfisher. A duet. Remember what we said about pair-bonding? Hear them? All right, we’ll move in, shall we?’
I heard at his word the razor-stropping duettists, male and female, at their hundred-times-a-day ritual of conquest and sex, and looked to the umbrella thorn. Three white-backed vultures: in a second thorn tree a little beyond, two more vultures, these white-headed. It was likely, then, that something lay dead beneath: and likely that lion had killed it. The vultures had not descended to the cadaver because the lion were still there. Very likely. Say, two to one on.
Well, naturally, lion had killed, and naturally, George wanted to move in. Between us and the thorn trees lay a smallish expanse of grass, parched and painted pale tawny by drought: lion-coloured.
George was seldom aware of people when lion were present, so, as was my habit, I checked the company, a short job, for we had but one client with us. Helen was a rather stately Englishwoman the far side of sixty, with tea-party manners. Vague, frail-looking and ladylike, she had done far better than I had expected when I (arriving rather more than forty minutes late, unfortunately) had met her at the airport five days ago. She had walked not swiftly but tirelessly, and she had taken great delight in the wilderness we had shown her. A client who falls in love with the bush warms a safari guide’s
