In high school I wrapped my back car door around a tree – I blame a friend taking too long closing his door. The mechanic went to the junkyard and got me a new door, but it still cost me $400. A couple of weeks ago we got the truck washed and someone managed to do the very same thing to the passenger door, but replaced the tree with a pole. Two days later the truck was good as new, better than before actually, and they didn’t need to replace the door, they bent it out perfectly and applied a new coat of paint for about $80. I would like my $320 back.
Dinners in the bush have started to come with live entertainment. Opening with a duet between two lions, the act was followed by the alert calls of baboons and ‘The Grudge’. Did you ever see that movie? If you haven’t this will be hard to explain, but I believe the writers poached their ghost sound from the Colobus monkey. We don’t often see Colobus, let alone hear them, so when I first heard this noise I started looking around for a freaky ghost that is known best for being captured on surveillance cameras at night in eerie buildings. Closing for the primates, was a fake buffalo calf and fake lion and hyena fight provided by yours truly in another attempt to add lion number 5 to our resume.
Lion number five - Kereng’ende (Karen-yen-day) ‘dragonfly’ in Swahili. She’s the largest collared female and she had puncture marks and scratches from another lion on her back. The good rains have changed things and the predators seem to be fighting over the best places to call home. We weren’t sure which pride she belonged to at the time, but have since seen her with Esipata. Twice now we’ve found her in a tree and the second time, one by one four other lions followed her lead. The fourth lion that inched up the trunk was Esipata. The fifth lion wasn’t in the mood to snuggle and tried options two and three before settling on a tree’s trunk that was more like an escalator. The lions awkwardly slumped over the branches and showed mild interest in a herd of passing zebra and wildebeest. After a few hours, the last lion walked back down her escalator and came within five yards of the truck, sniffing the air and then settled down into the 2-foot tall grasses in front of us – hardly remaining visible.
Adding more drama to the lion soap opera, Mwanzo and Ren were caught breaking pride lines and spending some exclusive time together. We don’t want to think about it, but this probably means that the cubs we saw her with earlier are no longer, if indeed they were her cubs. Lions mate about 100 times over the span of 2 or 3 days. The first day we found them they played hide and seek with each other for the whole 4 hours we were there. We left them at 8:30 in the morning sitting out in the open with zebra and ostrich and a few grants gazelles grazing about 100 yards away. Mating time is a free ticket for the ungulates; lions don’t mix the two pleasures. The second day they barely moved from their napping positions to their mating ones.
We made a cameo in this soap opera one morning when we ran into a fresh wildebeest carcass. Pulling up to the scene to check the tracks and investigate, a previously unseen lioness popped up and snarled at us from about 40 yards away. Paul’s translation, “Hey, I’m not done with that.”
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