We lost sight of her in the tall grass. Straining, we struggled to keep our binoculars to our eyes, like a bunch of khaki possums waiting for sundown. She was there. We had seen her watch the herd of wilder beast from afar on a rock, seen her slink into the grass in a C shape and into a ditch so as to avert their collective eye. For nearly an hour we had followed her, just a tiny shadowy speck among the high grass as she moved inch by inch closer to the herd, stopping every few steps to avoid being seen. The endlessly, flat wheaty Serengeti grasses cloaked her effortlessly - she disappeared and reappeared like a ghost or a mirage through tepid night air. But it was noon. The heat waves showed themselves on the flats. The few clouds served little practical purpose other than an impressive aesthetic one and offered little protection. You could count the trees and bushes for miles and you wouldn’t even make it to ten. The rest - a wide and perfectly flat spaghetti plain, itself transfixed on that huge peacock sky. The grasses as they waved in the dusty breeze made subtle patterns if you looked closely, circles of fading green and darker brown, waving yellow, and it was these that made her tawny head virtually vanish underneath the breeze.
Close to an hour dragged on now. We knew she was interested. She had been watching the wildebeest herd ever since we spotted her and had now she flanked them like an ambushing army, just her ears showing from time to time. She drew ever closer, even as she stopped to lie down below the grass for minutes on end to keep out of their sight. We scratched, swatted at flies, muttered to each other, contemplated the sky and tried to keep the binoculars steady in our hands as we waited to catch another glimpse of her. Only three jeeps left now, the rest had gone to ogle the male lions lounging by a tree a few miles away in the shade. A few wildebeest strayed from the herd. Right about then, she disappeared from view. We were sure that this was the time. She would pounce at any moment. There was one, so close within her clutches it had wandered all by itself. But still nothing. She was either stalking or sleeping. Too hard to tell which from this distance. Her patience showed her hunger. More minutes passed.
All at once it was on. She leapt from her keep and the herd of wildebeest panicked. A whoop rose from the jeeps like a hunting call as we watched her latch onto the front of her target - a large, stray wildebeest. The struggle that ensued was fierce and from a distance looked almost like a passionate dance. The lioness pawing for the neck as the wildebeest bucked for its life face to face with its fate. Our guides in the three jeeps were speaking hurriedly in Swahili until finally, without a thought, our guide pulled the jeep off the road and out across the plain toward the two, locked in their fateful battle. Standing in the back of the open jeep, careening at full speed over the prairie under that full breath of sky, I felt a rush of freedom - like I myself was a part of the race for life.
A cloud of dust had risen, lioness and wildebeest taking their turns at fate. One moment she was up hanging at its side on a ride for her prize and the next she had fallen under it, her feet tumbling in the air in an effort to bring it down. Desperation in every step of the dance, knowing every twirl was just inches from the edge of the universal stage. Both for their lives. She for another day of many without food and he for just seconds now, squalling in the dust of his fleeing herd. He was too strong for her to get a good grasp by the throat and so the fight came hoof to the tooth and both would go down fighting.
At last, as the jeeps leapt into the tall grasses where they struggled, she sunk her teeth around his muzzle and brought him with a creaking groan to the dust. Our jeeps crowd around her as she grips him with her paws and holds his muzzle firmly in her jaws. He was too strong to break around the neck. So, panting, she will suffocate him to death. His great black body weight was heaving beneath her paws. His black eyes rolling in their last terrible meeting in this life. His swelling belly still rising and falling in desperate last breaths. He shuddered as the air backs into his body. She held fast and tight, her jaws clenched around his face. He knew death was on him and he made a last, resigned effort with his legs. His suffering, from a Toyota jeep loaded with white-clad tourists snapping photos of his death throes, is almost unbearable to watch. Alive is this being we are watching like a reality TV show heaving in the labor of his last moments at the hands of a frantically hungry lioness. Oozing blood from the puncture wounds in his side, he is like a great king brought to the scaffold as his horns hit the ground and his eyes flare with fear and a searing suffering. Snap go the cameras. All of us, three jeeps in the middle of the Serengeti plain, bore witness to the ritual, a whole truckload of French children narrating it with flippant quips and airplane noises, and a walkie talkie radio hemming in the background. Death is so godless.
Exhausted, the lioness was panting heavily from the effort, her body heaving and her veins popping from her skin. Beads of sun ran down her golden fur when she moved. The jeeps had her almost surrounded now, like a pack of vultures were, within 10 feet of her and her kill. She glared hopelessly from one jeep to the other. There was no shade or tall grass for miles and the noon sun scorching our forearms. She looked desperate to drag her prey somewhere safe. But there was no where to go and no liberties to be taken as these three strange objects threatened the kill she so badly needed. She stood over the dead wildebeest, tongue almost completely from her mouth in exhaustion and heat. But her eyes darted from one human to the next in the trucks, asking us what we wanted and warning us from her hard earned meal. They were enough to shame a monk, those eyes, pupils almost disappeared completely in burning prairie fire as they looked at you. She was afraid and she was exhausted. All we could hear was the wind in the grass and her heavy breathing as she blinked her yellow eyes into the sun as if they led to the center of the earth. Many times she attempted to drag the prey a few feet, fruitlessly away from the jeeps, before she once again bent to pant in the sun. I flooded in shame, like a scantily dressed intruder in a place of devout worship. Something was sacred here and we had exploded upon it without grace. Like intruding on two lovers of great vitality and purpose. It had been a dance of brutality, beauty, achievement and loss. And an awful thing to behold. It left me feeling singed with its violence and its sincerity and its desperation. She has no mercy and yet she is not a demon. In all her glory, she is already absolved.
One by one the jeeps departed. The smoke rose from the drama that had been taken to that holy ground and life on the prairie moved on in silence. And we left her to her great plain, disappearing from view, a tawny, panting speck among the tides of the Serengeti grasses.
No comments:
Post a Comment