It was a quiet morning in the southwest, and we were trying to find two cheetah that had been seen the afternoon before. We had little to go on: some old signs, a scattering of tracks from the previous day’s sighting, but nothing fresh enough to commit to with any confidence.

Cheetahs are notoriously difficult to track. They’re light on their feet, lighter than a leopard even, and rarely leave the kind of clean, deep impression that a lion or a hyena presses into a road. Add to that the fact that they don’t stick to roads the way our other predators often do. No scent-marking habits pulling them back to the same drainage lines and cutlines week after week. No real interest in the easy walking a graded road offers when a straight line through the open veld will do just as well. And you have an animal that can drift through an entire block overnight and leave behind next to nothing to follow. So we did what you do in that situation: covered ground, checked the soft patches, and hoped for a scuff in the sand that told us we were still on the right line.

One afternoon we went out in search of cheetah, and just as the sun was about to set, this male was spotted in the distance. He walked straight towards the sunset, which lit up his eyes beautifully.

Tracker Bennett had gone down on foot to work a set of tracks. After some time, my radio crackled. It was Bennett telling me to switch off my engine. Impala alarm calls. We sat for a moment, listening. They were very close and as intense as it gets. The type of alarming that would make you stop everything and get into that area as quickly as possible, without second thought. There was no question of driving around to try to locate them; we simply pointed the vehicle at the noise and went straight in.

We hadn’t gone far before we saw vultures already dropping into the tree line ahead of us, always a good sign that we were closing in on something. Sure enough, tucked in against the thicket, we found the two Makhatini sub-adults standing over a freshly killed impala, barely minutes into the meal.

It’s a strange, slightly unfair relationship between cheetahs and vultures. The birds hunt entirely by sight, and a kill made in broad daylight, in the open, with impala scattering and alarming in every direction, is close to the most conspicuous event the bushveld can produce.

Vultures will often be circling within minutes of the chase itself, dropping lower in stages, waiting to see how much nerve the cats have left. And it cuts both ways; the same birds that led us straight to the sighting also broadcast it to every hyena and jackal, and on a bad day for the cheetah, every lion, within sight of that low, circling silhouette overhead.

The two sub-adults knew it too. Feeding was fast and watchful, heads coming up between almost every mouthful, eyes scanning the tree line, then the sky, then the tree line again. There is nothing leisurely about a cheetah on a kill. Sitting at the very bottom of the predator hierarchy, they simply can’t afford it. A lion will lie chest-down over a carcass for an hour without much concern for who’s watching. A cheetah eats like it’s already preparing to lose the meal, because more often than not, it will.

These two young male cheetahs were found hunting impala one afternoon. They were successful in bringing down a young male and fed on it quickly out in the open as the sun went down.

And on this particular morning, the danger was not hypothetical. Less than a kilometre south, one of our other vehicles was with a pride of lions who had clearly heard the whole thing unfold, the alarm calling, the commotion of the chase, and were sitting with their heads up, staring hard in the cheetahs’ direction. Nothing came of it in the end. But it was one of those moments that lays the entire ecosystem out in front of you at once: a kill fifteen minutes old, vultures stacking up overhead, a pride of lions a few hundred metres off with intent in their eyes, and two young cheetah trying to get enough of a meal into themselves before any of it caught up with them.

Where the family stands

For those who’ve followed the story, hers is one of the better ones we’ve had the privilege of telling on this blog. The Makhatini female raised three cubs, two males and a female, from small scattering shapes in the long dry grass to sub-adults nearly her own size. Cheetah cub mortality is brutal; in some populations as few as one in three cubs makes it through to independence. That she brought all three of hers this far speaks to just how good a mother she has been.

That particular chapter has now closed, more or less as we expected it would. The two young males have, as brothers tend to, thrown their lot in together, and will likely remain a coalition for life, a partnership that will serve them well down the line, whether it’s holding territory or occasionally tackling prey too large for a lone cat to manage. And, encouragingly, all three sub-adults have also been seen together again since going their separate ways, still finding one another out on the reserve. It’s the loose, overlapping company young cheetah siblings often keep for a while after leaving their mother, not the lifelong bond the brothers will form, but not quite a clean break either.

What has made the last few weeks particularly interesting is where the Makhatini female has chosen to spend her time. She’s been seen unusually close to camp, tucked into a genuinely thick, densely vegetated stretch of the reserve, exactly the kind of terrain a cheetah is not supposed to be found in.

It’s worth understanding why. Everything about a cheetah is built for one specific job: sprint speed in open grasslands, hunting by sight. In thick bush they can’t accelerate to full stride, and worse, can’t see danger coming until it’s already close. Take that visibility away, and you take away most of what keeps them alive.

It’s also, in large part, why cheetah have never really established themselves at Londolozi. We carry an unusually high density of lion, leopard and hyena, all of which comfortably outrank cheetah on the predator hierarchy, not through malice, simply through size and weight. Add our characteristically thick habitat into the mix, and the odds tilt further still against the most specialised sprinter in the bush.

So a female choosing to hunt and, evidently, kill successfully in dense thicket this close to camp, in one of the more predator-dense corners of the reserve, is worth remarking on. Whether it’s a calculated trade-off or simple opportunism, she seems to be making it work, for now.

It’s easy, watching a cheetah stretched out on a warm stretch of road in the late afternoon, to forget how precarious their place in this landscape really is. They can’t roar. They can’t fight. They can rarely defend a kill with any real confidence once something larger decides it wants one. What they can do is outrun everything else alive, and read a landscape with a precision built over millions of years of being, at once, the fastest and the most vulnerable cat out there.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for the Makhatini family, wherever the bush decides to let them turn up next.