Cry of the Kalahari

by Mark James Owens

  Late that afternoon we sat on the riverbed near camp, watching the orange sun turn silvery grass-heads into a sea of fire before it slipped below West Dune. Soon after, the valley echoed with the mournful cries of Captain, Sundance, Skinny Tail, Gimpy, and other jackals, their calls a lullaby to the lonely beauty of the Kalahari going quietly to sleep around us. The color drained from the sky, and the silhouette of West Dune quickly faded in the dusk. The click-click-click—like marbles striking together—of barking gekkos and the plaintive scoldings of plovers announced the coming of night. Finally, as the rush of cool air drained off the dunes, we headed back to camp.

  Mox had built a fire and laid out antelope steaks for us before going to his camp. “Go siami, Ra,” he called softly, meaning that he was finished for the day and was wishing us goodnight. The soft scuffle of his boots on the clay path to his camp sounded friendly, comfortable, at home. I was glad he was with us.

  We weren’t ready to eat, and for a long while just sat silently staring into the leaping fire. When the flames had died down a bit we could see beyond, and lying on the chips next to the woodpile a few feet away, were Muffin and Moffet. Sometime earlier they had joined us, and now they watched and listened as we quietly talked. We had to remind ourselves that they were wild lions. What we felt at such times could not be expressed with any one of the usual emotional terms. It was an amalgam, really, of several emotions: excitement, gratitude, warmth, companionship.

  Later they stood up and stretched, and then walked to one of the same trees that Bones had so often scent-marked. No more than ten feet from us, they turned, raised their tails, and jetted scent into its branches. Carrying flashlights, we followed them as they ambled into the kitchen. They seemed as big as horses, standing in the three-sided reed boma. Muff cocked his head and put his muzzle on the table, and I could have put my hand on his head as his fleshy tongue lapped up the meat Mox had put out for supper.

  Meanwhile, Moff was smelling the shelves. When he reached the twenty-five-pound bag of flour, hanging high on a post, he clamped his jaws on it and pulled. The sack ripped open and white flour showered his muzzle and mane. He stepped back, sneezing and shaking and flinging the flour all over the kitchen. Then he grabbed the bag and strutted from camp, leaving a long white trail behind him. Muffin followed him, and after they had pulled the sack to pieces, they lay quietly next to the kitchen, like big mounds of sand in the moonlight. Miming their soft coos, we walked quietly to within six feet of them and sat there, listening to the squeaks and rumbles of their stomachs. Half an hour later they stood up, roared, and then walked north up the valley.

  Each morning at sunrise we lifted off into the still, cool air to locate our collared lions and hyenas. I had turned Delia’s seat around so that she sat facing the tail and could use the plane’s food box as a work table. She would tune to the frequency of a lion or hyena, and by listening to its signal in her earphones and switching it back and forth between the two antennas, she would direct me toward the animal. When the signal peaked, we were directly over it. By taking compass bearings on two or three geographical features, we could plot our position on aerial photographs of the Deception research area and have a record of the subject’s exact location for that day.

  With position coordinates established, we would drop to just above the ground. Diving and turning steeply, heavy g forces pressing us into our seats, we tried to spot the lions. Delia took notes on habitat type, the number of lions in the group, what, if anything, they had killed, and the area’s prey concentrations, all while facing backward toward the plane’s rollercoaster tail. I don’t know how she did it; I would have lost my breakfast in five minutes. Yet she continued to fly with me every day for more than two and a half months.

  When I had gained a bit more experience and could safely fly at low levels while tape-recording my observations and operating the radio, I began making the flights alone. While I was in the air, Delia visited the hyenas or worked on data in camp. A couple of years later, after we had bought a base station radio for the plane, we often stayed in touch with each other between one lion position and the next, so that if I’d had to make a forced landing, she would have known where to look for me.

  One of the most exciting pictures that began to emerge from the radio-tracking was the relationship between the Blue Pride and the Deception Pan clan of brown hyenas. No matter where the lions were in their wet-season territory, the hyenas found them. The Blue Pride rarely made a kill that Star, Patches, or one of their clan-mates did not find. It became obvious that the brown hyenas depended heavily on the lions for food and that the clan’s territory almost completely overlapped the Blue Pride’s wet-season territory; even their scent trails often coincided. From the air we could see the valley and riverbed as a big gameboard, with the hyenas uncannily monitoring the predatory movements of the lions so that they could get at a carcass as soon as the predators had moved off. They were all players in a contest of survival.

  At the outset we had been concerned that the plane would frighten the lions, making close aerial observations of them impossible. We needn’t have worried. Very soon we could fly at grass-top level twenty-five or thirty yards away, without disturbing them. At this range, if we were quick, we could easily see a lion’s radio collar and often the color of its ear tag. The lions’ reactions to the plane varied. Muffin often made funny faces, rolling his eyes up without lifting his head as we glided over. Satan would crouch and sometimes playfully chase the plane a little way. Or if we sailed over his head, he would rear on his hind legs, pawing the air. Occasionally, when they were resting on the riverbed, we would land and taxi over to them and then picnic in the shade of the wing while we watched them.

  Though their manes were not yet fully developed, they each weighed more than 450 pounds, and Muffin and Moffet made it obvious that they intended to hang on to their claim to the Blue Pride territory in Deception Valley. They strutted up and down the riverbed every night and early in the morning, bellowing, scraping, and spraying their scent on trees, shrubs, and grass clumps along the way.

  One morning, however, a rift developed in the male alliance when Blue came rambling into camp with the males in tow. She was in heat and doing her utmost to beguile her two brawny suitors. She slinked and swayed bewitchingly before them, dusting their noses with the tuft of her tail. When two male lions court a female, usually one gives way—or they share her favors. But it soon became evident that in this case the issue had not been settled.

  After lying for several minutes near the plane, Blue began to move toward Mox’s camp, and together Muff and Moff approached her hindquarters as if to mount her. Instead they bumped shoulders. With growls and snarls, the two males stood on their hind legs cuffing, biting, and clawing each other. Blue ran to the other side of the tree island and cowered behind a bush. Muffin reached her first and whirled to face Moffet. Again they fought, and this time Blue made for the thick bushes at the edge of the riverbed.

  Muffin came away from the second round with his left eyebrow split and blood draining over his face. The two males snuffled through the grass, each trying to find the female first.

  It might have ended at this point if Blue, the reward, had not chosen that moment to peer out from behind the bushes. Muffin saw her and began trotting toward her. But before he had gone halfway, Moffet charged in from the rear. They fought viciously, rolling over and over, uprooting grass and shrubs as they raked and battered each other with heavy forepaws.

  When they broke up, Muffin took final claim to Blue—by now thoroughly intimidated by the fighting—and lay down facing her in the hot sun. Moffet had gone to a shade tree to rest. Blue grew more and more uncomfortable in the heat, and she began to look toward the place where Moff was resting. But when she rose to join the other male, Muff curled his lips, wrinkled his brows, and growled menacingly. She cowered and was held captive all morning, panting heavily in the sun. The situation was finally resolved when Moffet sought more luxurious shade farther a
way. After that Muff allowed his lioness to rise and they both moved to the spot Moffet had abandoned.

  For several days, while Muffin courted Blue, and for another week after that, he and Moffet were separated, even though before this, it had been unusual for them to be apart at all. Ten days after their scrap, we were awakened early in the morning by Muffin’s bellows as he approached camp. After spraying scent on the small acacia tree in the kitchen, he moved north along the riverbed. Another lion answered his calls from farther up the valley, and the two moved toward each other, bellowing continuously. When Moffet emerged from the bush near North Tree, the two males trotted toward each other. They rubbed their cheeks, bodies, and tails together again and again, as if trying to erase the conflict that had come between them. Then they lay down together in the morning sun, Muffin’s paw over Moffet’s shoulders. It would take more than a rift over a female to break the bond between them.

  We had spent years crashing through the bush in our truck to gather single tidbits of information on lions and brown hyenas. Now that we were using the plane and radio-tracking equipment, a stream of data began flowing into our field books. We knew where Muffin, Moffet, Blue, and the rest of their pride were on any given day and how far they were from the Springbok Pan pride, as well as from four others. To learn whether or not one of the lions had made a large kill, we simply took to the air, tuned its frequency, and flew over its head. I could depend on finding each of our collared animals from the air virtually 100 percent of the time, and could usually tell who they were with, in what habitat, how far they had traveled in the night, and whether or not they had cubs. It took no more than an hour and a half to two hours to find all of our collared animals in the rainy season. It was a field researcher’s dream.

  17

  Gypsy Cub

  Delia

  . . . the things which will not awaken are giving life to those that do . . . and thereby shall live again this spring . . . and always . . .

  —Gwen Frostic

  ALOFT IN EWG one morning, Mark circled the two male lions again, confirming what he saw below. Lying under the same tree, no more than three feet apart, were Muffin and Satan, rivals from the Blue and Springbok Pan prides. Each rested his chin on an outstretched paw, not moving a muscle, glaring intently at his opponent across the boundary of their adjoining territories. Moffet was nowhere around.

  After Mark got back to camp, we drove over to the lions and found them still trying to stare each other down. It was now midday and the shade had moved, leaving them in the hot sun. Slowly Muffin’s eyelids began to droop. His head nodded drowsily and then slipped to one side. Immediately a deep growl rose from Satan’s chest and Muffin’s head snapped up to meet the challenge.

  The stare-down continued into the afternoon. Whenever one of them grew uncomfortable and had to change position, a low growl would grow in his throat. As it increased in volume he rearranged his hindquarters, barely moving his head, and never taking his eyes from the other.

  Just after sunset both males slowly got to their feet, growls tearing from their throats, neither daring to look away. Step by deliberate step, they backed cautiously away from each other, finally turning and disappearing into their respective territories. Not a shot had been fired, but they had tested each other’s strength just the same; it had been a draw.

  Male lions who form an alliance with siblings or peers, as Muffin and Moffet had done, are more successful at gaining and maintaining possession of a pride and its territory than are single males.1 The odds would be against Satan if he ever confronted Muffin and Moffet together.

  The boundaries of adjoining pride territories were not entirely discrete, and there was some overlap: Members of the Springbok Pan Pride and the Blue Pride occasionally hunted on Cheetah Pan, at the border of the two territories, as long as the other group was not around. Yet the male lions, in particular, spent a great deal of time and energy during the rainy season defending their territories. They roared, raked, scraped, sprayed, and fought, if necessary, to maintain the claim to their areas and, ultimately, to the prey and reproductive females each encompassed. Muffin and Moffet spent hours roaring and scent-marking their boundaries, and they were especially vociferous in the period right after they assumed control of the Blue Pride territory.

  Mark played a dirty trick on Muffin and Moffet one morning when they lay sunning themselves on South Pan. Earlier, we had tape-recorded Moffet’s voice roaring an answer to Satan. Now Mark parked the truck about ten yards from where Muffin and Moffet rested peacefully, their heads on their paws, eyes closed, soaking up the sweet warmth of the new sun. He held the recorder to the open window and switched it on.

  When he heard his own voice, Moffet leaped to his feet and whirled around to face the truck. Mark turned off the recorder instantly, but there was no switching off poor Moffet. Thoroughly agitated by this strange voice, and squeezing out thunderous roars from deep within his belly, he took several steps toward the truck, then stopped, head erect, ears perked, eyes searching. When he got no answer, he roared again, and looked back at Muffin, as if to say, “Come on! Get with it! Some fool’s trying to take over our territory!” But Muffin, his head still resting on his paws, looked indifferent. After Moff had finished his fourth chorus of bellows, he walked to where Muff lay and roared again. As though he had no choice in the matter, Muffin stood up and, somewhat half-heartedly, added his bellow to the performance. After that, both of them roaring, and pausing only to scrape-mark, they set off at a fast walk, right past the truck, toward their phantom intruder.

  A few nights later Muffin and Moffet were on their southern beat when Satan’s roar came drifting over the dunes. They stopped abruptly, listening, and then roared in return, raking their hind feet through the sand. For three hours, while slowly moving closer together, the males called back and forth across Cheetah Pan.

  Several hours before dawn, Satan stopped answering the challenge, and a silence settled over the valley. Muffin and Moffet each killed a hartebeest from a small herd on the territorial boundary between the Blue and Springbok Pan prides. They were feeding on their kills when Satan stepped into the clearing behind them. He stood watching from twenty yards away until Muffin and Moffet turned. Their eyes burned with aggression.

  With tremendous roars and a shower of grit, they jumped over the carcasses and slammed into him. The charge drove Satan back several yards, his hind feet ploughing furrows in the loose sand. Claws extended, he lashed out with his heavy paws, snapping Moffet’s head to the side. Then, rearing to full height on his hind legs, his wide-gaping mouth exposing long canines, Satan turned and took Muffin head on. Looking like massive prizefighters, they bit, pummeled, and slashed each other’s shoulders, manes, and faces. Great cords of muscle stood out like steel cables across their backs.

  By now Moffet had recovered from Satan’s blow, and he attacked him from the rear, biting and clawing his back while Muffin hammered his head with both forepaws. With his enormous strength, Satan whirled and sent Moffet rolling into the thornbushes, but Moffet struggled to his feet, and he and Muffin charged Satan once again, driving him into the base of a tough desert bush. Heavy branches two inches thick splintered like matchsticks.

  Muffin pressed his frontal attack, but Satan was punishing him severely, stabbing deep into his shoulders and chest with his long canines. Meanwhile, Moffet was again mauling Satan’s back and flanks, crisscrossing them with open slashes. Though the bush partially protected Satan’s rump from Moffet, it would not allow him to escape.

  Muffin’s face was gushing blood from a gash that ran from his right eye to the end of his nose. He was weakening under Satan’s penetrating bites and thunderous blows, and his sides were heaving with exhaustion.

  With Muffin weakening, Satan moved away from the bush. But as soon as he exposed his hindquarters, Moffet caught his left hind foot between his teeth and bit down with tremendous force. Satan roared with pain, but confronted as he was by Muffin, he could not divert his attack. Mof
fet held on, and this seemed to give Muffin new strength. He pressed in on Satan, biting and beating his head with a series of blows that sent tufts of black mane and broken branches flying into the air and blood splattering all over the ground. Satan’s deep snarls and roars were gradually losing their power and changing in pitch to a near whine. Moffet now clamped his jaws around Satan’s lower spine, and biting hard, he crushed the nerves and vertebrae with a dull grating sound. Satan slumped to the ground.

  The brothers stood over the fallen lion for a minute. Then, panting heavily, Moffet turned back toward their hartebeest kills, with Muffin staggering after him.

  For a long while Satan lay unmoving, his stertorous breath gurgling in his throat. Flesh and mane dangled from his torn neck, and blood oozed from his broken spine. Then, very slowly, he raised himself on his forelegs and began struggling away to the south, dragging his useless hindquarters. But he managed only fifteen yards before he collapsed again, urinating blood and gulping air. Again and again he half raised himself and crawled toward his territory. But each effort cost him more of his waning strength. Finally, with a great shudder, he collapsed and took a last deep breath.

  When the new dawn arose Satan was dead.

  Sitting backward in the cockpit, I tried to keep my attention on the telemetry instruments in front of me, but from the corner of my eye I could see the white tail of the plane dipping and swerving just above the treetops.

  “Hang on. I’ll make one more turn. Try to find them,” Mark called over the intercom.

  I clutched the seat, and the plane banked slowly over the crest of West Dune. The ugly warning horn squawked on and off as Mark held the plane on the edge of a stall. Fighting the urge to close my eyes, I scanned the ground under the acacias for a sign of Sassy and Gypsy, who for some time now had been separated from the other females of the Blue Pride.