Wildcast

My first real job after leaving university was managing a game farm in the south-eastern corner of Botswana.

With my 7 week old puppy Tresca, (a Doberman/Rottweiler cross), I moved up there to start out on my wildlife career. My closest neighbour was an hours drive away and the closest telephone was 2 hours drive and across the border in South Africa. It was truly remote and a lonely existence but I loved it and for 3 years I traversed the area learning mainly from my own experiences and always accompanied by Tresca.

Godfrey, my right hand man, came to tell me one day he’d seen a young elephant bull walking past camp and it looked in a really bad way.
Armed only with a small axe, getting rifle licenses is very hard in Botswana, Godfrey, Tresca and I set out to follow up on the elephant’s trail.
Elephants spent most of their time on the river at this time of year, so it wasn’t unusual that there was one in the area of my camp situated on the Limpopo river.

There were limited numbers of plains game in the area, leopard were scarce, I’d seen one cheetah and there had never been any signs of lion in the area.
We followed the tracks east through the very bare area of Acacia nebrownii, past a small rocky outcrop and then along the edge of an extensive area of Ilala palms. Some of these palms grew in thickets but left open areas in between where at this time of year the soil was totally bare.

I walked ahead, Godfrey behind me and Tresca was running around sniffing at all and everything as dogs do.As we walked past one of these clearings all hell suddenly broke lose catching us totally unawares. We were obviously expecting an elephant but no such luck. Storming down on us about 60m away was a lioness in full charge. Out the corner of my eye I saw 3 little cubs running off into the undergrowth. I realised she was after us only to protect her young but there was no time to think about that.

At the first sound of trouble Godfrey was already gapping it. Realising his mistake and probably too scared to move myself, I shouted at him to stop running and luckily when he did, she did too, but not even 10m away.
I couldn’t help but stare her down a she stood there swiping her tail from side to side in anger and giving me the most terrifying stare back, accompanied with a deep guttural growl. I was frozen to the spot and by now Godfrey was too.

What seemed like eternity, but probably only a few seconds, and the lioness turned and trotted away. She didn’t head off in the direction that her cubs went but took another angle.

Gathering ourselves, Godfrey and I gave up on the elephant tracks and decided to get the hell out of the area. Then Godfrey said “She’s coming!!!” At first I couldn’t see anything. But suddenly like an apparition from hell she appeared from behind a bush about 150m away. No sooner had she appeared than she disappeared behind another bush. And suddenly she broke forth again into the open still coming at full charge. She went from bush to bush taking cover but coming out again at a full charge.

This time there was no hanging around. With her being a good distance off we had time and both scrambled for a small tree next to us trampling each other in our desperation to get up. And get up we did just in time. She pushed her charge to the base of the tree, checked us over and was gone again behind some cover.

We never saw her again and truly we did not want to see her again!

And Tresca? Well I still don’t know what she was doing in all this but somehow she managed to stay safe and was at the base of the tree when we descended.

A lioness protecting her young is probably the most dangerous lioness to encounter and not even thinking of lions had really thrown us a curveball which we were truly lucky to survive.