Two Gijima Males, two Kambula lionesses, eight cubs and one wildebeest. Anyone who has done the maths on that will understand why Carcass Clearing was not a quiet place this particular morning.

The wildebeest carcass had just been moved to the thicket line under a guarri bush, and the entire pride had arranged themselves around it in the way lions always seem to: nobody quite settled, one eye on the feast and the other on everyone else. Each mouthful came with a growl attached. Every time a cub edged in towards the carcass, there was a snarl, a flattening of ears, a paw lifted in warning, and then the whole thing would settle for a few minutes before starting all over again.

A pride on a fresh kill is a particular kind of chaos. The growling never seems to stop, and in the moments when it does, you can tell it is only paused.

The two Kambula lionesses with their eight cubs have been something of a constant fixture at Londolozi, but sightings of them have been few and far between while they stick to the core of the Gijima Males’ territory between us and our neighbours. To find this young pride with both of the males who fathered those cubs lying alongside them felt like a chapter of a much longer story finally falling into place.

Keeping Close to Gijima

Over the past few months, the two Kambula mothers have been spending as much time as possible near the heart of the Gijima Males’ territory. That might seem a strange choice, given the history. When the Gijima Males moved into central Londolozi last year, these two lionesses were the ones who chose to stay behind while the rest of the Kambula Pride scattered. It cost them. The Gijimas killed their cubs.

What followed is the uncomfortable logic of lion society. Within a couple of weeks, the lionesses were mating with the very males responsible, and by early this year both were visibly pregnant. The eight cubs arrived in March and April, which puts them at around six months old now.

A Gijima male and one of the Kambula lionesses mating in the recent heavy rain we have had.

And so the males who were once the greatest threat to this family have become its protectors. A lioness’s cubs are most at risk from other male lions, more than from hyenas or leopards. A new coalition taking over a pride will kill any young cubs it finds, bringing the mothers back into oestrus far sooner than if they were left to raise them. A female needs around two years of stable male protection to get a litter through to independence, which is why lionesses favour coalitions capable of holding ground for that long.

The closer a mother keeps her cubs to the core of the resident males’ territory, the more of their patrolling, scent-marking and roaring stands between those cubs and any intruders. A male with a pride of cubs behind him tends to spend more of his time patrolling the edges of the territory, meeting rivals out there rather than anywhere near the cubs. Lionesses, for their part, stay calm at the roars of their own males but grow agitated and retreat with their cubs when they hear unfamiliar ones. The Kambula mothers, in choosing where to raise their litter, are doing the sensible thing. They are living in the safest spot available.

Frenzied Feast

Lions are often described as the most social of the cats, and they are, right up until there is food on the ground. A pride does not queue at a carcass. There is no polite table manner. Each lion claims a section of the kill and defends it, and the growling is how they do it. A snarl costs very little, while a proper fight over a meal risks a torn ear or worse. So the threats come thick and fast, and the actual blows are relatively rare. What sounds like chaos is mostly negotiation.

The males, unsurprisingly, win most of those negotiations. At somewhere around 200 kilograms apiece, the Gijima Males simply move in and take what they want, and on a single wildebeest shared between twelve lions, that is a considerable portion. There is an old criticism of male lions, that they take part in very few hunts and eat first anyway, which can make them look like freeloaders. What we were watching in that clearing was the answer to that criticism. The lionesses are not feeding the males for nothing. That lion’s share is the price of protection, and two large males lying beside a kill are also two large males standing between eight cubs and the next coalition looking for a territory.

For the cubs, a carcass is both a classroom and a scramble. They are old enough now to be tugging at scraps between the adults one moment and suckling the next, and had their first proper taste of meat on a warthog kill back in August. They will start tagging along on hunts in a few months, begin genuinely contributing some time after that, and will not be capable of surviving on their own until they are roughly two years old. Until then, they eat when the adults let them, and at Carcass Clearing they were getting their lessons in amongst all the growling.

To watch these two males lying alongside eight cubs they would once have killed is not sentimentality, nor is it a change of heart on their part. It is simply how the system works, and for now, it is working in the mothers’ favour.

What I did not know at the time was that the most interesting part of the sighting had not even arrived yet. A commotion at a carcass of that scale carries a long way, and not long after, five more lionesses would walk into that clearing, but we will touch more on that in Thursday’s Blog, so stay tuned.