The wasp was back again. I was looking out over a dry lagoon on which a few puku and impalas were grazing. My small balcony had a rail in natural wood and the wasp, an inch long, kept returning to the same spot on it. So I picked up my binoculars and watched. She flew back and vanished into a hole. Curious.

I was back in the Valley. I was back in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia and I was ineffably happy. I had risen at five, gone for a drive, seen a lion and a leopard and an awful lot of elephants. I’d had breakfast in the bush before getting back to Mfuwe Lodge for a shower and a snooze. All good, but now I was doing absolutely nothing and that was even better. This is the best place in the word for doing absolutely nothing. Just looking at nature acting naturally.

That wasp was back and surely she was carrying something. Surely she was carrying something almost as big as she was. She vanished again: curiouser and curiouser.

Below my balcony two dozen banded mongeese* were foraging in the sand, digging with a frenzied double-pawed scrabble, as busy and as united as the more famous meerkats. Distracted – it’s easy to get distracted here – I missed the next flight of the wasp.

But I got her next time: and there in sharp focus she was carrying a spider with the air of good-natured Labrador carrying a pheasant. The spider wasn’t dead. It was much worse than that. The spider was paralysed. The wasp pushed it into the hole, a hole in which she’d previously laid an egg. The larva, once hatched would eat the spider alive, along with all the other living creatures in the grisly nursery, before emerging as an adult hunting wasp.

How fast she moved, how short a time between one deposit and the next. How lucky the new-hatched wasplet would be. How rich in life this place is, life of every sort. Tomorrow I’d be showing it to our clients. But now it was time for a cup of tea.

*My preferred plural

• I was co-leading a trip with Wildlife Worldwide https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com/discover/zambia