If I had to name the most polarising animal in the bushveld, it would be the spotted hyena. Some people light up the moment one appears, while others look at them with something close to disgust. Almost everything most people know about hyenas has reached them second-hand. The reputation arrives long before the animal does.

The animal itself is remarkably good at staying hidden. Not physically, you see hyenas constantly out here, but in the sense that the parts of their lives that actually make them extraordinary happen when we are not watching. At night. Underground. Inside a complex social structure. For those of you who have visited Londolozi recently, you might know what I’m talking about.

Over the past few weeks I have been shown two pieces of that hidden life, and both have changed how I look at hyenas, even though they have long been a favourite of mine. One of these sightings is something Bennett, who has been tracking at Londolozi for twenty-nine years, had seen only once before. The other is one of my favourite moments as a guide here so far.

Twice in Twenty-Nine Years

The first morning was one of those where the tracks had simply gone cold. We had been following a leopard since first light and had run out of anything worth committing to, and there comes a point where you accept that a leopard might not be on the cards for that drive.

As we often do when looking for a leopard, we switched the engine off, sat still, and listened for any sign: alarm calls, a sawing leopard, anything at all that might give us our next direction.

What arrived in that silence was a commotion of a different kind, loud enough and sustained enough that the leopard was forgotten immediately. Hyenas make a great deal of noise about a great many things and most of it amounts to very little, but there is a particular pitch to it when something is genuinely going on. This was that pitch. When you hear it, you go and find out why. The usual possibilities ran through my head: hyenas chasing lions off a kill, contending for scraps with a leopard or wild dogs. In reality, it was something far more unusual.

We found seven or eight of them scattered through the bush, thoroughly worked up and enormously interested in one another. And in the middle of all that fuss, two animals standing together and very deliberately not moving.

I did not immediately understand what I was looking at. Bennett did. It was only once he told me that I began to appreciate quite how unlikely it was that we were sitting there at all.

Female spotted hyenas are larger than the males, considerably more assertive, and built in a way that makes courtship a genuinely awkward business for everybody involved. Without going into too many details, her anatomy is unusual enough that mating is physically impossible unless she cooperates fully and patiently throughout. There is no forcing the issue in this species. Whatever else you might have heard about hyenas, this is an animal in which the female holds complete and final say over who fathers her cubs, and she cannot be overruled by size, strength or persistence.

Which means a male cannot win her the way most mammals go about it. He cannot see off a rival and claim the prize. He cannot rely on being the biggest and most dominant, because he almost never is.

So instead of competing, he applies.

Watching a male approach a female is watching an animal in two minds about the entire enterprise. A step forward, a pause, a small retreat, another step forward. Most of his advances are ignored outright and a fair number earn him a short, sharp lesson in clan etiquette. He may shadow a single female for weeks at a time. What she appears to be weighing up is not his size or his fighting ability but whether he has been consistently decent company over a long stretch of time, and older females in particular seem to favour males they have known, and been treated well by, for years. There is no display in any of it. No contest, no victory. Only an enormous investment of patience that, more often than not, comes to nothing.

It is also worth saying, since hyenas are so regularly mistaken for dogs, that the pair in front of us were not locked together the way dogs are. Hyenas have no such mechanism. They are not dogs, and are not remotely close to being dogs. They sit on the cat branch of the carnivore family tree, and their nearest living relatives are civets, genets and mongooses. The hyena we were watching is more closely related to the leopard we had failed to find that morning than to a wild dog. It is also why their young are properly called cubs rather than pups.

What stayed with me, though, driving away from that sighting, was a question I could not answer at the time. Why would any male put up with that? Years of being ignored, for odds that poor.

The answer lies in how a hyena clan is actually put together. Before I get to the second sighting, it is worth explaining a bit more.

The Social Structure of a Clan:

A hyena clan is run entirely by its females, and not loosely. Every female outranks every male, and not simply the alpha female over the average male, but the lowest-ranking female in the clan over the highest-ranking male in it, without exception. Rank passes down the female line, so a cub born to a high-ranking mother is high-ranking from the day it is born. It has done nothing to earn this. It will grow up displacing full-grown adults from carcasses purely on the strength of who its mother is.

A very fat – most likely either pregnant or nursing female hyena looks back over her shoulder.

The royal family is the comparison everybody reaches for, and it holds up better than most analogies do, with one lovely twist. Among hyena sisters, the younger outranks the older, because mothers back their youngest daughters in disputes against the elder ones. Imagine a monarchy running in reverse birth order and you are closer to the truth of it.

Males receive none of this. A male holds his mother’s rank only while he stays in the clan he was born into, and nearly all of them leave between two and five years old. The moment he joins a new clan he loses everything and starts at the very bottom, beneath every female, beneath every cub, and beneath every male who arrived ahead of him. From there he climbs largely by outlasting the ones in front of him.

So the male we watched had, in all likelihood, spent years arriving at that moment. Dispersing, starting at nothing, waiting his turn, being seen off and ignored and seen off again by a female under no obligation to him whatsoever. He had simply been persistent and pleasant, for a very long time. That is not the animal most people picture when they hear the word hyena, and it is the reason I have started telling guests about it.

Beneath the Termite Mound:

The second morning began with a noise as well, and led us somewhere I had wanted to find since I arrived.

A termite mound, and at the base of it, cubs. Properly small ones, black as coal, and so little that their eyes had barely opened. We had not known the den was there. Finding a den yourself, one you had no idea was even there, is a feeling I have not quite found the words for yet, and I suspect I am not the first guide to say so. We backed off, gave them plenty of room, and settled in to watch.

And then the adults did something I have thought about a great deal since. Every head came up at once and fixed on a single point out in the bush. There was a pause of perhaps two seconds in which absolutely nothing happened. And then they ran, not towards whatever it was, but directly away from it.

A few seconds later the Styx Male came through after them.

He is around five now, a lone male without a coalition, moving through the reserve alongside the Kambula Breakaway Female. He has made a living out of a difficult hand by taking whatever the landscape offers rather than picking fights he cannot afford to lose. A hyena den full of very small cubs, with the adults suddenly elsewhere, is exactly the sort of opportunity that reputation is built on.

The cubs, to their considerable credit, were already gone. Down into the mound before he had covered half the distance.

Which is worth pausing on, because that mound is the other half of the answer to why hyenas are so hard to know. Their young spend the first months of life inside one.

Almost nothing out here digs its own home if it can avoid it. A termite mound begins, unsurprisingly, as the work of termites, and as a piece of construction it is a very good one: hard-walled, well-drained, standing proud of the ground around it. Then an aardvark breaks into it looking for a meal and opens up a cavity, and moves on, as aardvarks tend to. What it leaves behind is prime real estate. Warthogs move in. Dwarf mongooses take the outer chambers and post sentries on the roof. Porcupines, monitor lizards and honey badgers are all in the business of occupying holes something else went to the trouble of digging. Wild dogs will claim one to den in, as a pack is doing on the reserve right now. And eventually, very often provided it is big enough, hyenas.

A single mound can pass through a dozen tenants across the decades, each enlarging it slightly for whatever comes next. Those cubs were sheltering inside a structure built by insects, broken open by an aardvark, and quietly renovated by a long line of animals, not one of which had the faintest intention of doing a hyena a favour.

The den itself is females only, which by now will not surprise you. Cubs begin life at a natal den, alone with their mother, and are moved at a few weeks old to a communal den where the clan’s youngsters are raised together, though each female nurses only her own. The adults we watched bolting from the Styx Male were, in the scheme of that mound, fairly peripheral.

And hyenas do not stay in one den indefinitely. A clan holds a handful of good sites within its territory and rotates between them as circumstances dictate. Parasites accumulate. Disturbance accumulates. And occasionally the reason is a good deal more immediate than either.

We had that den for a few days before the clan shifted the cubs to another mound they had used before, somewhere between five hundred metres and a kilometre away. The prevailing theory is that this was a natal den, and the cubs would have been moved on to the communal den before long in any case. But a lone male lion had just come through their nursery at pace, and they were gone shortly afterwards, and I would be surprised if those two things were unrelated.

In the space of a few weeks, then, I have watched a female exercise what is very probably the most absolute mate choice in the mammal world, and an entire clan evacuate its nursery ahead of a lion and relocate to a site they already had in reserve. Neither is the sort of thing that makes it onto a wish list before a safari. Both are considerably harder to see than most of what does.

Polarising, certainly. But I have yet to meet anybody who has spent real time with them and come away unconvinced.