Wild

Africa greeted us with wildness in stereo sound. Our first night in a tent at Maasai Mari, just beyond the canvas, a pod of hippos bellowed all night, their grunts vibrating through the ground. The next night a cape buffalo brushed against the tent wall. Here was one of Africa’s most dangerous animals (a buffalo killed a hunter from Dallas recently), inches from our heads, separated only by fabric. Then he moved on, leaving us in the silence of our pounding hearts.

The next day our jeep stumbled onto a pride of lions feasting on a fresh kill. Cubs were crawling inside the carcass while the elders ripped off the flesh.  The scene was raw and bloody…and utterly indifferent to our presence. Cameras clicked, but the lions barely flicked an ear in our direction – as we sipped wine in a jeep hovering right above!

We found ourselves woven into animal life in ways that felt intimate: baboons nursing their young while we sat in a pontoon a few steps away; a leopard walking right beside the jeep with her cubs, eyeing us like we were a sideshow.

What struck me was how little notice the animals took of us. We were just part of the landscape—strange, but unworthy of alarm. For all our anticipation of wildness—they treated us as background noise. 

When we wanted to kill them they feared us – but with today’s protection they have fully adapted to our presence. And that is its own kind of wild – an astonishing capacity to adapt, absorb, bend…to continue on with life. 

Toodling and Noodling, Stan