White lions: Timbavati’s elusive celebrities

Posted on 12 March 2012

Sod’s Law, the one game drive I didn’t wake up for was the one which rolled into a celebrity white lion and its entourage of yellow lions.

Dave, Motswari Game Lodge’s manager, broke the news breathlessly — he’s lived in the Timbavati Game Reserve for 10 years and has only seen the white lions once, at a distance. He’d asked one of the trackers to ready a Land Rover and momentarily we were trying to find the critter. It wasn’t where the last Land Rover and its human cargo, including my wife, had left it. Here Sod’s Law was applied again — all other days of the week it had been so infernally hot that no lion on an even keel would have moved a hundred yards before nightfall — they’d have ‘stayed lalapanzi fo sho’, in ‘Game Ranger’ parlance. On this day it was overcast and windy, the lions had moved off, crossed the river and entered a neighbouring reserve for which Motswari did not have ‘traversing rights’.

How much did I mind? About as much as if I’d missed spotting Brad Pitt at airport. Like many human celebrities that trade on their faces white lions need help to sustain a heart beat.

‘It’s a very unfortunate colouration to have in the bushveld, the one colour we advise guests not to wear on walks’ said Dave, though he added that lions are smart, and ‘will sometimes use the white members of the pride as decoys when they’re hunting.’

And anyway, I’d had an eyeful of beasties until that point: the Big Five in one day at Sabi Sabi, and again at Motswari. If there’s one experience that stands out, other than the young male elephant that practically voided himself on the Land Rover bonnet while simultaneously ‘dropping his fifth leg’, it would be the young male leopard Motswari’s Marka followed for an hour, over hill and dale, acacia and river bed. To begin with it wanted nothing to do with us but after a time he seemed to relax, or paused to consider eating one of the french journalists on his side of the Land Rover. I’d like to be able to say that in this moment I recalled, word for word, the final stanza of Ted Hughes’ poem The Jaguar:

More than to the visionary in his cell
His stride is wildernesses of freedom
The world rolls under the long thrust of his paw
Over the cage his horizons come

But I couldn’t, I’ve just looked it up now. Instead I reached for Blake:

‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright, in the forests of the night…’

I murmured.

‘Ssssh,’ went my wife, ‘pictures, take pictures.’

Recalling this castigation now as I witter on, here are some animal pics.

 

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