It’s me back in the saddle. Well not that I haven’t been in the saddle, I just haven’t been in the Wildcast saddle.
The wild dogs are all doing great but still no sign of Wave. It really is a mystery as to what happened to him. He was a great dog and big friends with Chevvy. Since then Chevvy seems to be spending most of his time lying up alone. But then Chevvy always was a different boy. He’s a great hunter and is often out there leading the pack.
The dogs were having one of their tribal games this morning well before sunrise when we found them. They’d cornered a couple of hyaena in some thick bush and weren’t letting them out of there. Although, actually the hyaenas just didn’t want to leave. They could easily have left out the back door, but seemed to be quite happy playing the game.
When another hyaena arrived the pups were quickly onto it, it too taking refuge in thick bush but by the sounds of it, it wasn’t having such a fun game.
In these games neither party has the intention of trying to kill the other. They might nip each other on the backside but that’s about as bad as it gets.
When I got out the car to join the pups in their game, the game ended abruptly when the hyaenas took off because of me. I like to think this scored me a few points with the dogs.
The pack still seemed full from yesterday’s killed and weren’t keen to move off, especially when it started raining. But try as I wish, I wasn’t able to film them in the rain as it came it little spurts. Some were actually quite big spurts, enough to soak me while my Mike Dolan, my script writer and Barend, my editor took cover under the tarpaulin.
The dogs had no plans on moving but we did and headed off in search of elephants again. We’d searched yesterday to no avail. Not even a track. Mike, out from Washington, was on his first visit to Africa and I just had to show him all my movie stars.
We got lucky around midday when a breeding herd of ellies came down to Tsuvuka pan. The soils there are red and once the herd had tucked in to that mud wallow we were left with these terracotta sculptures. A little calf was having piles of fun and soon some young bulls joined him, all putting on a great show for Mike.
We were back with the dogs in the early afternoon and already they were on the move heading south. Thankfully they kept to the track most of the way but once the chase was on we had to abandon our mission. The rains have left the soils really soggy in that area and I wasn’t keen to be digging myself out of clay for the rest of the day.
I presume they killed in there, as their signal didn’t move by the time we left them at sunset.
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