The Ghost, The Darkness, and Phantoms in the Night

I awake to the sounds of something eating outside my hut. A Kudu? A Bushbuck? I am not sure. I fall back asleep. Sometime later I hear light footsteps in the leaves. I listen intently, but they have stopped. I close my eyes, but there they are again, and now there is sniffing. A lion has caught the scent of the herbivore I heard earlier. There is nothing between me and it, but a thin wall of reeds. More light steps, some sniffing, and a soft roar. The lion lies down to wait. I worry about the guide who will come to wake me at 5AM when it is still dark. Will he see the lion lying in the bushes behind my hut? Should I try to warn him somehow?

The guides do not seem all that worried about lions, but lion attacks on humans are real. At Mokobo Lodge in Odzalla where I began my trip. The lions had to be hunted out because they were killing the lodge employees as they walked to work in the early morning. There is, also, the famous case of two lions killing numerous railway workers a little over a hundred years ago. They named them The Ghost and The Darkness. Fortunately, Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas arrived and killed the lions so the wheels of progress could churn again. But Val Kilmer is not here.

My guide arrives seemingly unharmed. There were elephants behind my hut last night. The lion and the story I concocted in my mind were just phantoms in the night. It was the elephants I heard. They are very light walkers for something so large. They were eating, sniffing, and even roaring. Rumbling really, but its sounds remarkably like a large cat.

Lions are real here, though. In the last two days, we’ve seen them eating an Impala and a Kudu.

Yesterday, as we left camp, the guides spotted the fresh tracks of a male lion not far from camp. They discussed it and we headed off to find them, taking numerous roads, stopping to find signs at each intersection. The guides seemed to think like the lion, but after sometime, they lost the trail. We had the roads; the lion had Africa. But losing the trail of the lions is just the beginning of the search for something else. There, a pair of bat eared foxes running across the landscape. Behind them an ostrich. Between the ostrich and us, a jackal. Under that bush, a spotted hyena.

Today, the process repeats, but the tracks we find belong to a cheetah.

"Really? Caught eating elephant dung, again? Where did you guys come from?"

Chaos at the Quelea bath.

Blue wax bills. One of my favorite of the African birds. (Photographer's note: over processed.)

"Awesome, some one left a huge ball of ear wax in here, Score!"

"Ten years of evil school is about to pay off."

Baby puku.

Male Kudu.

Elephants at sundown.

Impala at the Mwamba watering hole.

Giraffe and impala.

It's crazy how these leopards sleep in the trees. This guy is just waking up.

Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

"Don't even think about trying to take this cape buffalo from me."

Vultures thinking about taking the cape buffalo from the lion.

Zambia from the air.

One of the things I've been most impressed about on this trip is the dexterity and numerous uses of elephant trunks.

Zebra. In case you weren't sure.

This guy looks pissed off. No idea why. It was quite a nice day at the watering hole.