BOTSWANA
The impala is dragged to the ground and the leopard starts tearing into it with her incisors
F
irst of all, it’s just the four of us. Me, my husband, our guide, and the dead impala hanging from the tree.
We’d seen the leopard drag her kill up
there for safe-keeping the night before, unceremoniously draping what was left of its legs over branches to keep it suspended. But returning in the lilac light of a Botswana morning, all seems silent and still. She must have gone to the waterhole for a drink.
Which just shows how quiet leopards are when they want to be. There’s no warning; one moment, nothing; the next, the leopard has sprung from the undergrowth into the tree. I start in shock, barely managing to keep a firm grip on my camera. Within seconds, the impala has been dragged to the ground and the leopard is tearing into it with her incisors, ripping shreds of flesh and crunching bone, drowning out the clicking sound of my shutter with her ferocity. But in among the other noises, a different sound. Beginning just at the edges of audibility, but growing louder and louder, until there’s no mistaking it – growling.
“This is the wrong leopard,” says Cruise, our guide at Tubu Tree camp in the Okavango Delta. The leopard now feasting on impala is not, he explains, the leopard which caught the impala. And the growling? That’s coming from the original leopard. The impala thief can hear it too and, caught red-pawed, slinks away through the bushes, just as the rightful owner bursts on to the scene. Evidently extremely unhappy, she wastes no time. Grabbing the impala by its neck, she begins to drag it away. Bearing in mind a full-grown impala isn’t much slighter than a leopard, this isn’t an easy business. Its legs are dragging on the floor and tangling with hers, and at one point the neck gives way and the head falls off, but still she perseveres, dragging it nearly a mile through the scrub to a different tree. I think it’s safe to say that leopards don’t enjoy sharing.
And in this, they bear a striking similarity to patrons of luxury safari camps. These high-net-worth big beasts have no interest in sharing their game sightings with trails of other vehicles. Having someone else’s irritatingly
FAUNA FEAST: Botswana’s
diverse wildlife includes leopard, hippo, reed frog and lion
aspire september 2015 — 49
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