For each laughing matriarch of a hyena pack and full bellied male lion in the plains of the Serengeti, you will find the abandoned baby wildebeest and the banished cape buffalo that have been cut off from their herds. Their future here looks as bleak as the fly who's flown into the sticky, not-so-welcome confines of a spider's web. When it is time for the packs of the plains to hunt, these will be easy targets.
Behind a herd of zebras there is one fully grown female trotting behind them at a slightly slower pace. Upon closer examination, we see threads of bleeding flesh hanging from the back of the animal, meaning that this zebra might have survived an attack, possibly by a lion. The bad news, of course, is that the animal is now struggling to keep up with the herd and will be singled out when it is time for the predators to pick their next meal, as if from a menu.
Warthogs raise their tusked heads above the short grass, the mother in particular on the lookout for predators. The piglets intuitively remain by their mother's side. Once the cat and mouse game begins between predator and prey, attacking animals will do all they can to separate the mother from her piglets, which sadly means that one or two might have to be sacrificed for the good of the rest of the family.
We happen upon the den of a pack of hyenas, one of the top predators of the Serengeti. And out come the cubs, little tiny hyena babies no bigger than small house cats, rolling in the mud and playfully leaping about, their elders alertly guarding the perimeter all around them. There will not be many animals to challenge a hyena on the plains, but the ones that will -most notably lions- will go out of their way to kill the cubs in this ferocious dog-eat-dog world of the Serengeti.
A few hundred yards away is another assembly of safari cars, which means action. They are assembled at the base of a rock formation easily the size of a big mansion. This is the perfect place to hide out, as one would expect...or the place to avoid, if you are an unwitting grazing animal. There is no room for our Landcruiser, so Masagi decides to circle the rocks and come in from the other side.
A French tourist quietly tells us from another car that there are leopard cubs up there somewhere. It takes a while to spot them, but once I focus the binoculars, we see them in plain view. Not surprisingly, they are playing in a cave up there while their mother is probably out hunting. Remember what we said about dog-eat-dog, or shall we say lion-eat-leopard. Left to their own devices, these cubs would be easy prey, so it's not surprising that this is where the leopard would leave her cubs while she is out doing her business.
Although the cubs are endearing, you almost have to worry about them. If they easily attract human beings, imagine who else has spotted them by now -right, creatures whose sense of smell, hearing, and sight only compare to ours even remotely because of the approximate location on their faces. The hyena who can hear like a bat and smell a leopard miles against the wind would easily know where to find these cubs. Now whether they or a pride of lions would bother to scale the rocks just to have a whack at a couple of baby kitties is another matter.
Our camp is in the middle of the Serengeti, and we are pleasantly surprised by how chilly it is at this time of the year. No mosquito nets will be needed here. Before dinner, we sit around the campfire, knocking back bottles of Tusken beer. By now, it is night and the torches come out. Outside in the bush the animals get ready to saddle up while we get ready to settle in.
From our tents, we hear all sorts of animals at night. There's a lion marking his territory with long, drawn out roars, and the hyenas teasingly yapping out their responses. There are wild dogs and their long drawn out howls that carry quite well. One animal ventures too close to the camp, and we can hear its fierce growl before it is chased off, probably by one of the workers here.
This is not the suburban taunting bark of dogs or the drawn out growl of cats, but the elaborate turf war between the Serengeti's most formidable predators, and we inside our tents know who the featured players are. Although there are thousands of different critters in the plains, only a few voices really carry, those loud and fierce enough to be heard.
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