This has been said at the start of every entry in this series, and it stays true. There is a weird kind of obsession that takes hold of people who spend any considerable time with leopards at Londolozi. Rangers who have been here for decades will still sit in complete silence, fixated on an animal in the tree above them, long after the guests have stopped asking questions. This series attempts to honour that obsession and the animals who caused it.
The Tatowa female was one of a litter of three females born in early 2012 to the Ximpalapala female of the north.
Tatowa 3:3 Female | Born 2012 | Died 2021 | Short Tail Female Lineage
This has been said at the start of every entry in this series, and it stays true. There is a weird kind of obsession that takes hold of people who spend any considerable time with leopards at Londolozi. Rangers who have been here for decades will still sit in complete silence, fixated on an animal in the tree above them, long after the guests have stopped asking questions. This series attempts to honour that obsession and the animals who caused it.
Most of the leopards in this series are animals we came to know over years, through hundreds of sightings. The Tatowa Female was different. Many guides had been here for a substantial time before even laying eyes on her. She lived in the deep south of the reserve, in broken country of rocky ridges and deep drainage lines where the roads run thin and the leopards run thinner, and she made a life out of being hard to find. When she did appear, usually draped along a marula branch in the early light, it had the feel of a small privilege, because you knew how rarely it happened.
That she was there to be seen at all was the first unlikely thing about her.
She was born in early 2012 up in the north, on Ximpalapala koppie, one of three female cubs of the Ximpalapala Female, a leopard so shy she was barely known herself. For a few months that litter was one of the great sights of the north. The three sisters spent their days in the marulas and on the warm rocks of the koppie, and curiously they grew up bolder around the Land Rovers than their mother had ever been, choosing for themselves when to come down to the vehicles and when to melt back into the rocks. When their mother appeared, she would pull them back into wariness, and the viewing was always better when she was away.
Then, late that year, it ended the way so many leopard stories do. The Gowrie Male moved in and took over the koppie, and two of the three cubs were killed. Only one survived. She was still a youngster, and she left.
Where she went was itself unusual. Young females almost always settle on a corner of their mother’s ground, close to where they grew up. This one did the opposite. She struck out right across the reserve to the deep south-west, probably because the prime country nearer the river was already spoken for, and she set up a territory around the Tatowa drainage and its dam. That is where her name came from, and that is where she stayed. It was quiet, out-of-the-way ground, and she slipped into it so completely that she became one of the least-seen leopards on the whole reserve.
For years that was her story: a beautiful, solitary cat in the far south, glimpsed now and then and then gone again for months. And then, in 2017, she gave us the chapter that mattered most to her.
She had cubs. Two of them, a young male and a young female, hidden away in the rocky folds of the south. It was hard enough to find her alone; to find her with a family was rarer still, and for a while she gave us some of the finest sightings of her life. The three of them were once discovered stretched out together on the fallen trunk of an old schotia, the cubs clambering over their mother before she led them off down the drainage to the safety of the rocks near Python Rock. They were much the same age as the Tamboti Female’s cubs over in the south-east, and once or twice the two little families were found within a few hundred metres of one another. The cubs seemed to be thriving, growing up under the watch of the Inyathini Male, the dominant male of the south and in all likelihood their father.
But the deep south is beautiful and it is hard, and it hands nothing to a leopard. One by one the cubs were lost, until neither remained. After that, the Tatowa Female seemed to fold back into her country. The sightings, never frequent, grew rarer, and then, sometime in 2020, they simply stopped.
Because she had always been so seldom seen, there was no single moment when we knew she was gone. There was just the slow accumulation of her absence, until enough time had passed that we had to accept it. We never learned what happened to her.
It would be easy to call hers a sad story, and in its losses it is. But that is not quite how she is remembered. She is remembered as the one cub of three who lived, the young female who walked away from the place that had cost her everything and built a life as far from it as she could get, and who held that lonely stretch of the south as her own for the better part of a decade. Most people who came to Londolozi in her years never saw her once. She was there all the same, moving quietly through her rocks and her drainage lines, asking nothing of anyone. For a leopard, there are worse ways to be remembered than that.
To recap the previous leopards, follow the links below:
The Mother Leopard
The Camp Pan Male
The Ngungwe Female
The Senegal Bush Male
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