27-aug-09

Sitting at the hyena den, waiting for the tourists to leave, Candida is bleeding from the nose. We are in a land where people die from Malaria and sleeping sickness, tuburculosis and AIDS; I am slightly concerned. Candi has been recovering from her bout of malaria with surprising speed, but the blood worries me. She shrugs it off: “It is normal,” she says, “I feel fine.”

The tourists leave a cloud of dust as they follow the road across the dry, short grass clearing. The spectacularly alien Serengeti savanna exudes an aura of prehistory that reminds me vaguely of Yellowstone National Park. I remember the hot, acidic pools of our first National Park’s famous geyser basin. While most of the cookie-cutter tourists never waddled farther than the 300 ft from their car to Old Faithful, just past the famous geyser lay a minefield of colorful hot springs, each lined with rainbow rings of heat-adapted micro-organisms. In the weeks that I spent trying to “find myself” in Yellowstone, I most often lost myself watching the sun rise over the geyser basin. Sitting and watching the steam rise over the pre-dawn frost that sparkled in the low light of the waking sun felt like watching the dawn of time. I can remember thinking that maybe if I sat and watched those pools for a few billion years, I would see fish grow legs and crawl onto land.

The Serengeti too feels like a land before time, with the fat cape buffalo trundling through the tall grass in front of our yard, the elles eating our aloe garden, and the giraffe in their slow-motion methodically chewing through our acacia trees. I half expect sometimes to look up and see a brontosaurus browsing by our vaguely otherworldly creatures.

The Smithsonian reporter that was here asked us what the coolest was thing was that we’d seen in Serengeti. I remember falling silent. In four short weeks, I’ve seen a million breathtaking, heart-stopping events that I might never see again. I’ve seen a solitary female lion kill a Thompson gazelle in the middle of the day. I have spent the night next to 7 lions that draped themselves luxuriously over an elephant carcass while glowing hyena eyes circled impatiently around, sniffing and rejecting our onion skins and carrot shavings while waiting hungrily for the lions to leave. I have held my breath in the heat of a lion-elle standoff, and retreated from the middle of an epic 3 on 1 battle between neighboring male lions. I have helped to collar a female lion, to de-snare a tangled zebra, and to dart a mother elephant. Climbing a kopje one day, I came face to face with two unattended lion cubs. Camping out in the Western Corridor, I was awakened by a hyena sniffing the ground by my head with only the sheer synthetic fabric between us.

But despite all of the excitement that we stumble onto while making our daily rounds, I think my favorite thing of all is to sit on the veranda just before dawn and watch the world wake up. The house faces directly east and the sun always rises red through the haze of grass-fire smoke. From here I can sometimes see pink and purple lizards doing pushups on sunny rocks, showing off for their plain brown females, and knee-high Tommies locking horns and butting heads in a twitchy capoiera display.

The lions have moved back into the area and this morning I can hear them roaring from just past the neighbor’s house. A cautious hyrax approaches the bucket of leftover wash-water to steal a free drink, and plops down, splay-legged on the cold stone porch. One lazy morning, we spent an HOUR watching the elles pick off thorny branches from our toppled fever tree, their trunks snaking through the foliage, slow and methodical, moving it to their mouths. The elles are my favorite, with their thick, drooping skin that looks several sizes too big. The babies are only hip-high, and they wave their ears when they run to catch up to their moms. Some days the baboons move in slow, cacophonous procession around the house. They get into our rubbish pit and open our water tanks and sit and blink their ugly little eyes at me as they crunch on the fallen Acacia seed pods. Today, however, has been quiet, save for the lions sounding off in the gray morning light as Candi and I loaded the car for my last day in the field.

Finally, as the tourists move off, Candi sniffles and shoves the car into gear. We close in for some close-ups of the gnarled hyenas. So far, I have 271 photos from 4 dens, 2 kills, and a million random locations that I am trying to ID using ear notches and spot patterns. I anticipate spending most of my 11-hour layover in Jo-burg scowling at iphoto and grumbling to myself. As September draws near, I try to fend off the overwhelming sense of panic that rides along each day like oxpeckers on a cape buffalo’s back. I will just take it day by day, den by den, and spot by annoying-yet-individually-identifiable spot.