Sometimes you travel for thousands of miles over the course of many days, all for the sake of two seconds. For those two seconds you have invested all those hours and all those miles — and you account it a bargain. Best deal of your life. Knowing those two seconds will stay with you forever.

It was the first morning of the Festival of Wildlife in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. After yesterday’s rain it was pretty cool and the word had got out: thanks to the easy conditions the dogs were up and about. And hungry. A pack of wild dogs, floppy and doggy and wonderfully jolly at times of rest, are also the most efficient hunters in the Valley and perhaps the world.

We drove round trying to find them. They hunt best in open country but here the bush was pretty thick. It wasn’t clear whether we driving at random or whether Meshach, our guide, had some kind of intuitive foreknowledge of the dogs’ movements.

But they weren’t here and they weren’t there and when we moved round the next line of trees they weren’t there either. Ah well. If you like looking for wildlife you get used to such things: they’re not tame dogs and it wouldn’t be fun if it was easy, now would it?

We tried another change in direction: and then, through a window between clumps of vegetation, the low morning sun in my eyes so that the bushes and the grass and the air itself were all lit up and golden, an impala, horned and male, appeared with dramatic suddenness, going like the clappers, not a hint of playfulness in his elegant stride. An instant later, a dog: not floppy, not jolly, but in the withers-down flat, hard gallop that a dog saves for business. Three yards behind came another, grinning hard, mad ears folded back, both of them locked onto the vanishing antelope like a pair of life-seeking missiles.

And gone, just like that. Two seconds. That was it. We looked about a bit but we never saw them again. I don’t suppose anybody has even seen the galloping impala again. But that that vivid moment, those two seconds of action, the hunt at its peak, golden impala followed by two golden dogs – well, I took no photo  but I have it forever on the indelible film of memory.

We drove on. A black cuckoo was calling, the first I had heard on the trip.

 

• I was travelling with Wildlife Worldwide. More trips https://wildlifeworldwide.cmail20.com/t/y-e-xididdd-thukydkiuh-r/