Hi!

We've had a wild couple of days. I'm joining you from a brief pocket of rest break WiFi, and I have so much to catch you up on.

We're going to start with two stories from our first safaris in the Masai Mara, and they're both about carnivores.

Love

We noticed the big boy first. How could you not, with that magnificent mane?

Then we noticed someone else lying down in the grass next to him.

Our big boy, we joked, was on a date.

("Netflix and chill?")

He gets up. Lies down again a little closer. Gets up again. Raises a tentative paw.

("Hey, you up?")

And then it turned out our anthropomorphic joking was correct. He actually was on a date - and we'd arrived at the end.

I have no photos of this, partly because it felt rude, and partly because by the time I'd finished laughing, he'd finished too. Lions, it turns out, are not renowned for their stamina.

("Bring me a cigarette, will you?")

Death

On day two, it was our turn to get lucky.

But for us to get lucky, someone else had to get very, very unlucky.

Maybe skip to the end if you're squeamish.

The first sign that something interesting was happening was that the jeeps were swarming.

Or maybe flocking is a better description. Or schooling? This isn't a centrally signalled behaviour - it's based purely on looking at what those around you are doing and following some simple rules. If you see people stopping to have a look, you stop to have a look too.

This was a big flock. And at the centre was a cheetah.

Just... totally unfazed.

This was already pretty cool.

But then the cheetah started to run.

It dodged through the flock - right past our car - towards a nearby herd of topi.

- there was a moment of struggle, tastefully hidden by a passing Jeep -

- and the cheetah emerged. Not with the topi it had been chasing, but one of the younger animals we'd been cooing over before.

But that wasn't the hard part to watch. The hard part was seeing its mother come back for it, pacing out the radius where maternal instincts and survival instincts were perfectly balanced.

We moved on - but the other cars stayed until they saw blood.

Animals

I don't think it's a coincidence that both of these stories both about carnivores.

We've seen herbivores a-plenty too, but the simple maths of the food chain means that there are just straight up fewer carnivores to go around. That makes them a bit more memorable by definition.

But I also think it tells us something interesting about us, and where in the food chain we fall.

(Bear with me, cause we're going to indulge in a little tour bus anthropology here.)

The stories we tell about herbivores are about us, and usually about how we caught them them - even if that's seeing them, or taking a photo of them, rather than hunting them.

The stories we tell about carnivores are different. We kinda can't help projecting ourselves on to these animals.

The things that matter to us map much more neatly on to the hunters than the hunted, and I think you kinda gotta embrace that to be out here.

The story of humanity's recent history, I think, has been the story of us learning to get those impulses under control. Suppress them, or find a better outlet for them - like sports, or video games. Or safaris.

Because a safari is, basically, a hunt. Sure, it's one where we're snapping photos and not bones, but looking at the infrastructure and the terminology around it, it's pretty clear that we're not so far from being literal hunters too.

And to bring it full circle, maybe that's why we find watching a leopard kill a topei so gruesomely compelling - it's an outlet for a thing we're only just learning to control.

And speaking of controlling impulses, I have to head to bed. We got a 4am start tomorrow - not for animals, but to beat the traffic. Truly, the wildest animal of all.

Catch you next time I have WiFi,

Rocky.