Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [99]
Juan soon leaves the dirt tracks that serve as roads at the Lalibela Game Reserve, and drives carefully through the brush upwind of the lions to avoid startling them. On the way, he tells us, “Remember to keep silent and don’t stand up or move around much. The wildlife views the Rover as a single, nonthreatening animal, but hearing voices or seeing movement can make them curious in an undesirable way. The worst thing is for anyone to get out of the Rover, because that signals it isn’t one individual animal. In this case, the lioness still feels especially protective of her young cubs and will for several months longer. We’ve got to be wary of her.”
Bill says, “The male didn’t seem nervous or threatening yesterday. He was just lying lazily on that hilltop gazing into the distance and yawning occasionally.”
Juan wrestles with the steering wheel to avoid a bush before responding. “The lioness is much more dangerous. She’s the hunter of the family, even though she lets the male eat her kill before taking a turn herself. Lalibela released a new male lion just this week, and no one knows yet where he’s hanging out. At some point before long he will probably try to kill the cubs, because that puts the mother in heat again, and then the males will fight for dominance and the right to mate with the lioness.”
A vivid image of that ritual jolts Cheryl, who read a magazine article a couple of days earlier describing the mating routine. The author reported that the sexual carousing lasts about five days at intervals as frequent as every fifteen minutes. When she showed the story to Bill, he said, “That would give you and me both a headache pretty quickly.”
Juan pulls into the thicket, stopping about twenty yards from the family. The male reclines peacefully by himself under a tree and the mother sits between her cubs a few feet from each, all of them facing away from us but certainly aware of our presence. After we watch them for five minutes or so, Juan backs out and tells us, “I’m going to move to the other side to get better views. We’ll be looking directly at the lioness, who will always give us clues if she’s getting irritated. Watch to see if she lays back her ears, grunts softly, or flicks her tail, ways she warns off bothersome animals before attacking. Usually lions aren’t too interested in people unless they appear simple, helpless prey, like someone walking through the veldt alone.”
Juan parks in a grassy area a little closer to the mother and cubs than we were before. She stares at us intently but stays still for a couple of minutes before suddenly whipping her tail into the air. Bill, ready to jump out of his skin, nudges Juan, who whispers to him, “One more flick and we’re out of here.” Right on cue, she does it again, and the ranger backs the Rover away slowly.
“Yikes,” says Annette, the lady in an Irish couple. “That was edgy.”
Anna, a jocular young Swedish woman—who, like all Swedes, speaks English well, along with some fifteen other languages—agrees quickly with a little laugh. “I’m going to have to wash my underwear tonight.”
For the next half hour, Juan drives around in search of an African buffalo, sighted nearby recently. “They are mighty creatures,” he says. “They even scare and sometimes kill lions. It takes at least two lions to down a mature buffalo.” Bill spots the broad, arching horns of a buffalo deep in the brush, too distant to see clearly. In trying to find a better perspective, Juan encounters a group of giraffes grazing on treetops. Juan points to one of them. “Look at the scratches on his hindquarters. A lion tried to jump him from behind, but the giraffe kicked him away. Antelopes, zebras, and other animals like to hang around giraffes because their height gives them an advantage