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I looked again to my right. The lion’s mouth, which at the now greatly reduced distance between us was as big as the mouth of a trash can and just as commodious, had drawn parallel to the car’s radio antenna. Something inside the steering column clicked softly. Whirling, I jabbed a finger at the button mounted on the armrest. Much too slowly, the window started up. As it was rising, the lion, attracted either by the noise or by the movement inside the car, turned his head in my direction. His eyes passed over me and for just an instant, met mine. I froze. All he had to do was reach up, stick a paw inside the car, and fish out the paralyzed food trapped inside. Dropping his eyes, he turned back to the pavement in front of him and continued on without pausing next to the car. I was just another component of the peculiar unchewable object on wheels and therefore of no interest. Or maybe he was not interested because he had just eaten.

Since I was already sweating about as profusely as possible from the heat, I can’t say that I noticed much difference in the amount of perspiration trickling down my body. But it would have been interesting at that moment to have taken my pulse. Had the window remained wide open and the lion been disinclined to conform to standard lion practice, I would not be recalling the close confrontation now. I would have joined the unfortunate impala on the afternoon’s buffet. My breathing eased as I watched the big cat recede behind the car.

“Did you get the picture?” I finally asked Ron.

“Picture?” He looked at me sheepishly. “No, I was too busy watching.”

I stared at Ron for a long moment. My fingers may have twitched. Then I turned the key fully in the ignition. I’d had enough of baking in the sun and playing potentially fatal peekaboo with hungry apex predators.

Driving at a consistent speed of precisely three miles per hour, we eventually succeeded in limping into Timbavati. There, a curious mechanic contemplated our completely flat front tire, eyed me disapprovingly, and asked, “Why didn’t you just change it?”

I don’t remember my exact reply, but I do recall that I managed to respond in words of more than four letters.

* * *

Tanzania, August 1984

AS TANZANIA’S FIRST PRESIDENT, JULIUS Nyerere was admired by many, both inside Africa and out. Opinions regarding the rest of his government and many of his policies tended to be considerably less complimentary. Under the communist-socialist system he imposed, the usual inescapable afflictions of state-run commerce affected every aspect of Tanzanian society. Shortages of basics became even more commonplace than elsewhere in East Africa, industry stumbled along deprived of raw materials, and traditional African subsistence agriculture found itself subsumed into the familiar dreary people’s communes where no one is inspired to work one iota harder than they absolutely must to avoid the approbation of their fellows.

For years, a reader of mine named Bill Smythe had been imploring my wife and me to visit him and his wife, Sally, in Tanzania. Bill was a rodent control expert who had worked for various international aid programs everywhere from Fiji to Pakistan to Somalia and was, at that time, posted to Morogoro, a medium-size city about three hours’ drive inland from Tanzania’s capital of Dar es Salaam.

“Come on over,” he kept writing. “I’ll save up our gas ration coupons, and we’ll take a couple of drives around the country.”

This invitation finally being too tempting to ignore, JoAnn and I eventually found ourselves on a British Airways flight from London to Dar, with brief layovers in Cairo and Khartoum. As a harbinger of interesting developments to come, even these two brief stops proved themselves of interest.

Assigned to the forward section of the plane, we turned in our seats as in Cairo group after group of white-clad men and women boarded the aircraft. A number of the men sported ritual scars on their cheeks. Noting