6th September 2000
Arriving back to where Tjololo had his kill this morning we found no kill but Tjololo in the area and to my amazement he was still growling. His contender doing the same a short distance away. From their behaviour it appeared they had just resumed their showdown. We think the other male might have returned to feed on the carcass.
So the night went on as a very frustrated film crew followed after 2 male leopards lying up growling at each other continuously. It is hard to imagine this is all they did all night, for a second night running, only moving occasionally to parallel walk some 20m before lying up again. We had to hang in there as at any time they could fight, or so we hoped. Even the constant harassment of 5 excited hyaenas couldn’t break up the party.
Around dawn while on one of their little walks, the other male came rocketing out the bush and in a brief skirmish some distance ahead of us they both disappeared into Kruger.
We can only hope their ordeal will be over this evening.
Tjololo’s total trust in us, or maybe his totally ignoring us, became very apparent last night. At a time when he would have been under a lot of stress with the showdown, we parked a way off from him. He later got up moved towards the vehicle, sniffed around, marked the ground and promptly lay down right there, only a meter from us, and then proceeded to fall asleep or appeared to. He had no reason to have to lie right next to us. It just seemed that that was where he was going to lie and that was it. Were we just another rock/log to him?
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