Shockingly great day for animal sightings: two leopards, a cevet cat, an owl, three rhinos, and my first wild dog sighting in Africa. We saw the dogs this morning at their den – if I was to see one at a pet store I wouldn’t recognize it as anything other than a domestic dog with painted fur, although these guys can take down a zebra. The four puppies ran right up to the vehicle, with the adults looking on. We stayed with them only briefly since a leopard had been sighted nearby, and then we pursued the cat off-road, crashing over bushes to get a view of it by a riverbed. At one point the tracker, seated in an open chair on the front of the vehicle, had the big cat walk only a couple of feet from him, so apparently they don’t eat people during daylight hours.
Our evening game drive was even better. A couple on honeymoon asked if there was any chance of seeing a rhino, since that was the one animal they had not yet seen during their three days at the lodge. Thirty minutes later the guide had patched into the bush news network and found us two rhinos drinking at a waterhole, followed by a third who showed up in a field. After sunset the tracker turned on the spotlight, and the eyes of a cevet cat (something I hadn’t seen before) were one of the first things to be reflected back at us. Finally, when we were just a few hundred meters from the lodge the light picked up another set of eyes, this time belonging to a leopard that was hunting next to the road. For the next two minutes we were surrounded by darkness with a leopard in the beam of the light six feet from us. This leopard was second only to the Magic Bus leopard on my list of favorite cat sightings of the trip.
Three game drives remain at this lodge, after which my time on safari will sadly come to an end as I move on to Cape Town, find the jet-lagged Audrey at the airport, and begin the “sharks from cages” phase of the adventure. The days continue to end with a deep sense of gratitude for having a life in which I get to enjoy all of these magnificent sights and have all of these incredible experiences.
