Every so often, the bush hands you an afternoon you could not have scripted if you tried, and then, as if to check that you are paying attention, it folds three separate stories into one.
This one began the way the best afternoons usually do, with the radio. A pangolin had been found. For anyone who has not spent much time out here, it is hard to put into words what those words do to a Land Rover full of guides and trackers.
Pangolins are among the most secretive animals on the reserve. Many people who come to the bush their whole lives never lay eyes on a single one, and I am new enough to this place that I am still counting my encounters on one hand. So we were already turning in that direction.
Almost in the same breath, a second call came. The Shingi Male, the young leopard so many of us have watched grow up, had been spotted nearby and was on the move. And then the message I suspect every guide quietly hopes for and half dreads in the same instant. The two sightings had become one. The young leopard had walked in almost on top of the pangolin.
By the time we were able to make our way in, the encounter itself had quietly resolved. The Shingi Male had done his investigating, concluded there was very little here for him, and withdrew to a nearby tree. At Londolozi, we only ever allow three vehicles at a sighting at a time, which on an afternoon like this one asks a fair amount of patience from everybody waiting their turn. It is a small discipline, but it is the kind that keeps these moments unhurried and keeps the pressure off animals that deserve the room. So we sat off to one side, watched the light turn soft and gold, and went in when the gap was presented.
The last surviving cub of a litter of three, he is on the cusp of independence.
Our first view of him, draped along a branch in that boneless way only a leopard can manage, before he poured himself down the trunk and slipped off into the grass. We left him to it and crossed to the pangolin. And there he was, exactly as a frightened pangolin ought to be, wound into a tight and perfect ball.
It is worth pausing on why that ball had just defeated a leopard. The name pangolin comes from a Malay word meaning, more or less, “one that rolls up,” which is the entire strategy in a few words. They carry no teeth and no real appetite for a fight. What they carry instead is armour: the whole body sheathed in overlapping scales of keratin, the same material as our own fingernails. When danger arrives, the pangolin tucks its head and legs away and folds its tail over the top, locking the scales into a seamless shield, and then holds that shape with a surprising amount of muscle. The edges are sharp enough to draw blood, and a cornered pangolin will hiss, puff and lash out with that armoured tail if pushed.
Those who have watched these things for far longer than I have will tell you that even whole lion prides have been seen to work at a balled pangolin, batting it about, trying to bite through, and eventually conceding defeat. The scales are too thick to crack and too slick to grip. The Shingi Male, young and still writing his own rulebook, had simply arrived at the same conclusion that bigger and older cats reached long before him.
And then the bush produced its third act. A herd of elephants had been feeding close by, and without any fuss or drama, began to move in around us, until we were sitting with this small knot of armour while elephants flowed past the vehicle on every side. Three lives that had nothing whatsoever to do with one another, the Shingi Male, a pangolin and a herd of elephants, pressed for a few minutes into the same handful of square metres for no reason other than that the bush had decided to put them there.
We stayed with the pangolin, perfectly safe inside himself, while the giants drifted through. When they had moved off, we went back to look for the Shingi Male. He had not travelled far, a few hundred metres perhaps, low and intent in the grass behind a termite mound. On the other side of it, oblivious, a small herd of impala were feeding their way through the last of the light. The whole vehicle couldn’t quite believe how this afternoon had turned out.
For the moment he sits in the in-between. He is independent in every practical sense, more than able to feed himself, yet he is still lingering in and around his mother’s territory, recently pushing a little further to the northwest or the east before drifting back to the parts he knows. There is a clear reason for this restlessness. Once a mother turns toward focusing on a new litter, she begins to lose patience with the older cub. That growing intolerance is the bush’s gentle, unsentimental way of saying it is time to go.
Back at the termite mound, the stalk had already begun to come undone. One of the impala lifted its head, caught something it did not like, and let out that sharp, explosive alarm snort that runs through a herd like a current and notifies a leopard that the game is done. In an instant, every head was up and turned his way, the whole herd fixed on the mound, and the surprise that any hunt depends on was simply gone. Perhaps he had shifted his weight a fraction too soon. Perhaps the patience and the hard-won timing that only come with years were not yet fully his. Whatever it was, the window had closed, and he seemed to know it.
He held his crouch a second or two longer, then rose and slinked off into the grass, unhurried, as though the whole affair had been his idea all along. In its own quiet way, it was the most fitting end to the afternoon we could have asked for. We had watched a young leopard turned away first by a small ball of armour and then by a herd of impala, and in both we were shown the same gentle truth. For all his size and all his promise, the Shingi Male is still a young cat learning his trade, with a very long road in front of him. As he slinked into the thicker bush, I couldn’t help but wonder where he might be in a few months, a leopard cub that we have watched grow up, now independent and facing so many new challenges.
For the time being, we are keeping a keen eye on him, and am hoping to bring you more updates very soon.
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on The Shingi Male, a Pangolin and a Herd of Elephants