Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [102]
On our six game drives, we enjoy good sightings of four of the “Big Five” African animals—lions, buffalos, rhinos, and elephants—but never see any leopards, who Juan describes as “hide-and-seek artists,” active mainly late at night. Once, Darrell gets the guests in our Rover excited by calling to report a “leopard in its shell.” Juan knows his friend is teasing us, but takes us anyway to see a leopard tortoise, speckled like the namesake cat.
The buffalos are more elusive during our visit than usual, the rangers tell us, but we have one great encounter. As Juan drives us back to dinner one pitch-black night, Bill sits beside him scanning the brush with the ranger’s powerful spotlight, looking for reflected glare from animal eyes. Suddenly, two small headlights gleam back at us from a buffalo standing near the road. Magnificently muscular, he looks as big as the Rover, a hulking black beauty with glorious upward-curling horns and flaring nostrils. Set one of these creatures loose in a bullring and the bullfighter would faint on his sword. Irish Annette laughs softly, whispering to us that she expected to see the curly-haired head of an American bison.
Bands of rhinos pop up regularly around the reserve, particularly the larger and more sociable white rhinos. “They aren’t really much different in color than black rhinos,” Juan says, “but these are the big boys, weighing in between two and three tons each at maturity. They had dwindled in population to around thirty-five at one point, due to hunting, but are coming back slowly. The females produce only a single calf every three or four years, probably because it’s not much fun to give birth to a one-hundred-pound baby.” Our group sees an infant once, wallowing playfully with his mother and other adults in a mud hole on a warm, sunny day.
Most of the elephants hang together in a herd that the rangers never find during our stay. “How can a bunch of elephants hide from experienced trackers?” Cheryl asks.
“They’re clever,” Juan replies. “There are young calves with them now, whom they want to keep out of sight from the big cats.” Males tend to be more solitary than females, and we do come across two of them frequently, always alone. “These guys are really unpredictable,” Juan says. “All of us fear them more than any other animal, because of their size, strength, and erratic behavior.”
“Has an elephant ever injured any guests?” Bill asks.
“Yes, killed two as a matter of fact. A pair of women friends insisted on going off by themselves on walks, despite repeated warnings about it. They ended up a mess, I hear. Those are the only deaths we’ve had at Lalibela.”
The two males are called Floppy and Gaadjie, the latter earning his Afrikaans tag from a hole in one ear. “The rangers rarely name animals because it breeds a familiarity that may make you less cautious around them,” Juan says. “These boys are so distinctive, they’ve become exceptions.” Around us, Floppy is the more aggressive of the pair. He ambles toward us once, getting too close for comfort, and another