A lion roar is not to be confused with the petulant snarl that comes before a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer film. The real thing sounds like a god vomiting up the earth. It fills the bush from one horizon to the other and it fills the soul of listening humans with awe and terror. I was back… [Read More]

            My great and alas late friend John Burton, the maverick genius of conservation, was a great one for the underdog. He always maintained that elephant shrews were more interesting then elephants. I never asked him, but I have no doubt whatsoever that he believed zorillas are more interesting than gorillas. The zorilla or… [Read More]

            I saw an aardvark near the foot of Aasvogelberg: it was a night of rejoicing, and not just because of those glorious double-As. I was in Samara and the fact that I saw not one but two aardvarks says a great deal about the land I was visiting. Aasvogelberg, by the way, is… [Read More]

Dusk was falling. I had almost completed a new personal best: the 13-hour game-drive. But what else could we do? We had commuted across Samara from one wonder to the next, all the time savouring a single miracle: this was a land that had, more or less literally, been farmed to death, and was now… [Read More]

            Eagle Rock looks over the Plains of Camdeboo in the great Karoo north of Cape Town. I surveyed this apparently endless stretch of land, keeping a cautious few paces from the edge, and thought about loss. And what follows. There was a time not long past when this rock provided one of the… [Read More]

              Enlightenment must be like this… the sudden enlightenment of the Zen student who perceives infinity in an instant of time and is forever richer. I had arrived at Samara, in the Karoo in South Africa, the previous day. I knew that the Tompkins family had loved and cherished the place for a… [Read More]