We heard her before we saw her and that’s not usual with leopards. Darkness has just fallen and we soon had her clear in the spotlight — and more obvious even than her beauty was her distress. She was calling, a series of little rasps, soft and intimate, but every now and then she gave the fall leopard roar: the one that sounds like three or four forward-and-backward strokes of a handsaw.
She was looking for her cub, Lloyd told us, for he is on first name terms with all the local stars. The cub was three-quarters-grown and male, almost but not quite ready to strike out on his own. Perhaps now he never would.
The Luangwa Valley in Zambia is probably the best place in the world to see leopards. The guides know them well as individuals and the leopards themselves are well-accustomed to vehicles and spotlights and pay them no mind. So long as you don’t use the light to help or to hinder the actual hunting, no harm is done and the leopards bring almost daily delight to the people who visit.
But this wasn’t an occasion of pure delight. As we followed her everyone in the vehicle was taken up with the human or pardine emotions of the unfolding events: willing her to come round the next bush and for the leggy, spotty youngster to emerge and a great feline greeting to take place: a mother and child reunion, nothing less. Here was a strange and beautiful privilege: sharing the emptions of a leopard.
At length she returned to the tree in which she had cached her most recent kill, an impala she had shared with her cub – and there in the tree was an answering movement, a great flowing of spots and suppleness in the tree.
Joy was short-lived. This wasn’t the cub but the resident territorial male, and he was not the cub’s father. He had been helping himself to the delights left in the tree. He might have killed the cub himself, so might hyenas, so might lions, so might the nearby pack of wild dogs. Here even the carnivores are vulnerable.
The female turned and walked away from the tree, away from the big male. I am used to feeling all kinds of emotions about leopards, wonder, glory, humility and joy. But pity – hat was a new one.
- I was co-leading a trip with Wildlife Worldwide https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com/discover/zambia
Greatly enjoying these Simon.
Jane guessed today’s subject first time. Odds-on a bush pig in a few days?
I trust also one on the river(s). The ever-present star of the show.
Many thanks!
A very touching piece in another world – thank you Simon.
Thanks Sue. Sad but beautiful night
You continue to write so beautifully about nature – thank you. I’ve followed you since your days in the mainstream print media.
I’ve always been doubtful of the value of ascribing human emotion to the animal world due to its ferocity and divergence from our place – your recent piece on wasps and spiders, a case in point.
I’m curious of your thoughts on this matter.
Thanks again.
It’s a perpetual puzzle. But I’m a horseman. If I agreed with the the philosophers who say that horses have no moods and feel no emotions I’d win a great deal of respect in such circles — but I’d also be badly injured if not dead. It’s all in Darwin: difference, no matter howgreat, are not of kind but of degree.