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 full of life and purpose and meaning again.

But time for one more thing. I was invited to step out of the vehicle. Now hear a plain truth: the wildlife you see with your feet on the ground goes far much deeper than wildlife seen from a vehicle. That’s because you’re a participant, not an observer – and it’s personal.

So I walked to within 20 yards of them and there I stood in the middle of the open plains of the Great Karoo while five cheetahs sprawled out before me, paying me no mind whatsoever and finishing off the day’s meal of springbok. The wind whipped across the grassland, the light faded and the cheetahs glowed.

There was a lot of ecstatic mutual face-licking: here were five of the fastest animals on earth content to be still even with humans a cricket-pitch away. One got up and stretched and then flopped down again. Another took a last mouthful. One more offered a playful cuff. Here was a family and a world at peace with itself.

This was a mother and four cubs. Two were her own, the other two were her mother’s cubs, which she adopted on her mother’s death: she was raising both her mother’s cubs and her mother’s grand-cubs.

I stood there, trusted by cheetahs, and I felt an extraordinary pang of connection: to the family before me, to Samara and the healing it had undergone, to all of wild Africa and to all of nature. After a while I realised I was, in the manner of Jacques Cousteau, witnessing this sight through a good deal of saltwater. Damn wind…

 

 

https://www.samara.co.za/