The Hunt: A Matter of Perspective

Natural History, March 2017

 

 

At dawn in the Okavango delta, a bird chorus was just starting up. We were clustered around a smoldering campfire in an unfenced clearing under tall leadwood trees in the Moremi Game Reserve. Ras Munduu, our Botswanan safari leader and guide, casually walked to the edge of our clearing and ran back shouting, “Quick, quick, get in the truck!” Having heard hyenas, hippos, and lions in the night, our party of four scrambled to jump in behind him. “Dogs!” he said.

After a frenetic ten-minute ride, we found ourselves in a pastoral setting among seventeen African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus). They were lolling about in the dry grass on the remains of an old termite mound. A thin mist lay over the green channel of the nearby Khwai River. Hippos had returned from their nocturnal roaming. In anticipation of another hundred-degree day, they were submerged in the river while crocodiles basked beside it. Elephants were coming to drink, and more than two hundred Cape buffalo, which had arrived in the night, were now accompanied by cattle egrets and oxpeckers. We heard the deep but faint roar of a lion in the distance. The dogs were at ease, playing and looking like a passel of lean painted pooches, each blotched in a unique pattern of black, yellow, or chocolate, and each distinguished by its behavior.

 

African Cape buffalo.

 

As the dogs noodled about next to our open-sided Land Cruiser, they took no visible notice of us, making us feel as if we were wearing an invisibility cloak. We were strongly admonished, however, not to reach or lean out, or talk. The vehicle seemed to be a mutually accepted safe zone with prescribed rules of engagement between us and the wildlife.

One of the dogs suddenly stood stock-still, pricked up its large ears, and gazed into the distance. The others did likewise, as did we. From our position we saw only a vast expanse of low, elephant-browsed mopane trees. Scattered rain trees and fever trees also had their limbs browsed bare, up to a height of twenty feet, by elephants and giraffe. The dog that had alerted the pack suddenly bounded off. The rest followed but only in the same general direction; they spread out. A hunt was on. We took off after them. “They can run like this forever,” Ras said. While “forever” was hyperbole, the day was still cool, and the dogs and their intended prey would not easily overheat and slow down.

After a several-minute wild ride following the dogs, we saw zebras. One of the dogs veered off and approached the herd. Rather than running, the zebras formed a circle around a young colt. One of the zebras of the group stepped forward. The dog backed down from the challenge and rejoined the others. After a few more minutes, we saw impala, small, graceful antelope, that were running faster than the dogs. Yet in less than ten minutes, we heard, from back in a large thicket, the telltale bleating of a kill in progress. Hours after birth, baby impala are agile, fast runners, but these young are not fast enough to outrun a pack of dogs. Their mothers had hidden them in the bush and then run off, acting as decoys. The fawns, however, must have been flushed. Dogs emerged from the bush, carrying the remains of three fawns, and some were having tugs of war over the parts. Others were lying about, tearing and chewing the meat. The dogs had been silent throughout the hunt, but now some made high-pitched chittering noises as they approached those that had already feasted, begging them to share by regurgitating what they had just hastily ingested.

The dogs were a team. It takes a group to make a successful hunt—prey that escapes one dog may inadvertently run into another—but the group must be small enough for all to share the quarry. As with wolves, only one pair in the pack breeds. Breeding privilege is based on merit, which in wolves and in African wild dogs depends on status or strengths, which subsume health and heredity. Division of labor in reproduction, as in the hunt, permits some members to tend a den of young pups while others hunt.

Before we had witnessed the hunt, we had felt emotionally moved by the beauty and grace of impala and their fawns, the most endearing, slender-legged, joyfully prancing creatures imaginable. It is hard not to empathize with them. Yet we were not entirely neutral in the outcome of the chase. We became transfixed by the dogs and transferred our allegiance to them. As we saw their strategies unfold, we felt participation; we were pseudo-predators, stepping back into the mindset of the Pleistocene hominids who once hunted here. They probably had a social system similar to the dogs’. They ate meat. Being bipedal, they were good runners. And they would have shared the spoils of the hunt by bringing it back to a home, or a lair. We were drawn by the same instincts, except our spoils were the images and stories we hoped to capture and bring home to savor and to share.

From small to large, there were predators everywhere in the Botswanan game reserve, but we had so far—despite driving and exploring ten hours per day for three days—not sighted lions, although every night, when sounds carry far in the cooler moisture-saturated air, we had heard rumbles of what seemed like distant thunder, except they were pulsed in a rhythm. On our fourth night of hearing these distant rumbles, Ras declared that there were lions six to seven kilometers away. The next morning at 5 a.m., when we heard the sound again, Ras started the engine of the Land Cruiser and called out, “Let’s go!” Tourist talk to whip up enthusiasm, I thought. No way could anyone pinpoint the location of a specific animal in this vast, 4,870-square-kilometer tract of pristine wilderness. But we loaded up and tore off on another wild hunt. Like the first, it promised excitement, no matter what we might see, merely due to the elements of speed, expectations, possible discoveries, surprises, and companionship of the like-minded.

Our journey took us down bumpy and curvy single-lane sand paths through mixed woodland and grasslands. The first rains had begun to sprout shoots of grass on the tawny dry ground. The landscape was flat to our eyes, but to Botswanans there are elevated islands among the various lagoons of the Khwai River, where massive trees grow. Eons ago, winds brought white sand and sculpted the islands. They were made suitable for life by the water that floods them after heavy rains flow south from Angola during January and February. Hippos created channels that helped distribute the water, and termites built mounds twenty feet high on which the trees grow.

After about a half-hour, we stopped to photograph a giraffe. Like all animals here in the reserve, it had no fear of us in a vehicle. At first we heard only birdsong; then we heard a series of deep rumbles. We were close to the lions. In less than ten minutes, ahead of us on the flat top of an abandoned termite mound, lay a mature male with a shaggy brown mane and a grizzled face, staring off into the distance as we drove within fifteen feet of him. He was so close, we could see his thin body hair speckled with flies. None of us could avert our eyes from him, but he did not even bother to turn his head to look at us. Instead, his gaze reached into the distance. It was minutes before he slowly turned our way and we could look into his bright yellow eyes. He yawned and revealed a massive maw and an impressive set of teeth, then turned his head back and resumed semi-somnolence. A younger male, his partner, lay about two hundred meters distant, similarly at ease. Male lions often pair up with another male, usually a littermate, to overpower males holding prides.

These two lions were roaring to proclaim their territory and discourage challengers. Their pride of females, according to Ras, would be in the vicinity, or at least within hearing distance, or several kilometers. As we watched for some ten or more minutes, the older lion started to rouse himself, making a few soft rumbles. His belly then heaved and the rumbles became louder and louder, as he held his head higher and higher. We were stunned by the volume heard at such close proximity. We stayed a half-hour to watch this fully wild animal, which had no more regard for us than he had for a weaverbird or a glossy starling. Ras speculated that he and his younger partner were gearing up for a fight to defend their territory and pride. A single lion would have no chance against this reigning pair. Their challengers, however, might be a pair of five-year-old brothers who live in the same area and who were now coming of age. Ras thought they would be well matched against this pair, which had so far maintained dominance for three or four years. If the challenging pair succeeded, they would kill all the cubs in the defending pair’s pride, which would bring the females into heat.

Females are complicit in these contests. To ensure their cubs’ survival, they promote challenges that test dominance. But how can females decide with whom they have the best future? They fake being in heat, which induces mating by the newcomers, which in turn leads to fights. For the mothers, a victory by the younger challengers usually means greater long-term security.

 

Our hunt for the top predator in the Moremi Game Reserve was successful, with images and stories as trophies. We moved on to find smaller game. After an hour of driving, we stopped to photograph a carmine bee-eater. Its gorgeous red and blue coloring was striking. Ras drove us to its source—a breeding colony of hundreds. These birds normally make nesting burrows on high riverbanks. But there are no riverbanks on the Okavango Delta, and for this colony, the birds’ hundreds of burrows were on a table-flat plain. A kite showed up amid the fluttering of birds, perhaps hunting for a young or injured baby. A bateleur eagle soared overhead.

As we were leaving the birds, driving past a bushy low acacia bush, we spied two male lions lying side by side in its shade. Ras declared they were the five-year-old littermates, the possible challengers to the pair of lions we had just left.

We watched this pair as long as we had watched the first, but they made no sound. Admiring them from up close, we noted that the one to the left kept looking up into the sky. Ras said, “Lions are lazy. He is observing vultures—to find out where to find a fresh kill.” A bateleur eagle was also flying, but the lion watched only the spot in the sky in the other direction. Eventually, we saw one, then two, vultures soaring. They were gradually coming lower. The lion maintained his rapt attention, eyes up and locked on. The other remained stretched out flat, perhaps asleep. The first got up, and with slow measured steps walked within several feet of our vehicle, then continued in a beeline toward where the vultures had just come down. He sauntered on, without a single glance back. Eventually, the second righted his front end and watched his brother with apparent rising interest.

At that point we decided to follow the leading lion. We drove ahead of him and then circled around and got into position among some trees, hoping to intercept him. Soon enough, he appeared and broke into a steady trot. He kept on through tall grasses and then climbed onto a termite mound; we then parked nearby. Within a minute, the second lion appeared, also trotting. He joined his brother, and the two stayed side by side, watching the vultures, several of which had by now landed in treetops. “We’ve got to connect the dots,” Ras said, and speculated that the vultures were not yet on the ground because the animal that made the kill—likely, a leopard or a cheetah—was still nearby. The lions were waiting for it to leave, which might take a day or more, so we left without seeing the end of the drama.

Several days later, having left behind the invisibility cloak of the Land Cruiser, I was forty thousand feet above the ground, traveling at around six hundred miles per hour. The sixteen-hour flight gave me time to reflect on the wonder of having seen and experienced, as near as is possible, the Pleistocene environment of our ancestors two to four million years ago. The tracks Lucy left in the stone at Laetoli about four million years ago took on new meaning. A similar assembly of animals would have roamed then, doing what these do now. Australopithecus (or whatever ape-man came after) would have had to be localized to where there was a reliable source of water. Small isolated populations can generate rapid evolution. The dangers meant deaths were frequent, selection strong. Meat was plentiful, especially concentrated near water. If lions could locate hyena, leopard, and dog kills, so could our forebears. They too could have followed the vultures, but on foot. They would have waited until the heat of the day had produced the thermals on which birds ride as they patrol the ground and the predators were resting lazily in the shade, not eager to travel. Hominids had the capacity to tolerate the heat through sweating as well as a low profile to the sun, a sun shield of hair and melanin. Most significant, allowing them to be there at all, they had grasping forelimbs. They had hands free to wield weapons—rocks, sticks, and clubs—and the collective will to use them. Soon enough, they became selective in what they held, and some started to alter what they held into tools and weapons.