It was one of those days when we had no guests in camp, so we headed out to go do some much needed road maintenance. There were six of us (3 Rangers and 3 Trackers).
While busy fixing one of the roads one of the trackers noticed a large number of vultures sitting in trees about 400 meters off the road. With so many vultures around there had to be a kill of some sort.
The curiosity was eating us away so we decided to take a walk in to see what the vultures were looking at.
All we had were 2 spades, a panga (machete) and one of the Rangers had a kattie (sling-shot) on him.
Once we got to where the vultures were we would stop then listen very carefully for the sound of something maybe eating, look carefully around, walk a few more steps then look and listen again.
Eventually we were surrounded by at least 200 vultures in the trees.
Suddenly there was a loud growling sound from behind us! We whipped around to look, and saw 2 big male lions about 30 meters away! We had walked right passed them without even seeing them! As they stood there growling, 3 other male lions stood up from out of the long grass and started growling as well. It was the most amazing powerful sound, it sounded like 5 V8 engines revving it up, you could feel your chest vibrating.
One of the trackers tried to make a run for it, and with that we grabbed him by his collar to stop him from running. When in a situation like this you can’t run as it shows the lion that you are afraid. “When the mouse runs the cat chases.”
Slowly we started walking away from the lions facing them all the time until we were a good 80 meters away. They just stood there growling and eventually stop when we were out of sight.
Once back on the road we got into the Land Rover and then drove back to where the lions were. The lions had killed an adult Giraffe. We managed to find the rest of the pride, another 16 females and youngsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment