The AfricaAway Safari Companion - On Safari
Old Guide’s Tips Number Five: Body Language
True Stories Number Six: Lion Encounters
One of the ‘tricks of the trade’ is to keep an eye on the body language of the armed scout who leads the group. If he is sauntering along with his rifle slung carelessly over one shoulder, then all is well. If he swings his gun into the ready position, then there is potential danger (if he chambers a round then you’re really in for a ‘moment’). There’s quite a lot more to learn by studying the scout. It’s obviously very important to approach animals from down wind, and you will often see the scout either kicking up a bit of dust, or letting some trickle though his fingers, in order to check on the current wind direction. He will also keep all of his senses open for unusual animal behaviour, such as antelope in an ‘alert’ posture, indicating the possible presence of a predator, informative sounds, unusual smells that could indicate the existence of, for example, buffalo, or of a kill nearby, and keep his eye on the sky, looking for vultures, for example, that could again indicate the presence of a kill. A word of warning here – once, on spotting a small numbers of vultures circling in this way, we approached to the locus of their interest, to discover over a hundred of these unlovely creatures feeding on a carcass. Then as one they rose into the air, flew in our direction, and crapped directly over us. Believe me, if you’re going to get crapped all over, then vultures come very low on the desirability list!
On one walking safari a party of American ladies had solemnly taken in the instructions as to what to do if a lion ‘moment’ occurred – don’t run, walk slowly away, without turning your back. Soon after, on an early evening walk on the bank of a dry river bed, we came upon an elephant in a bad mood, and dropped down into the river bed itself to detour around it. Then, on coming around a bend, we came across a magnificent male lion sunning himself on the opposite bank. The writer was transfixed by this magnificent sight, just a few metres away. However the American ladies decided that enough was enough, and proved that they had carefully assimilated the advice given to them. The writer was then torn between continuing to watch the lion, or watch these ladies attempting to scramble up a 45 degree banking – backwards! In fact it wasn’t really a triumph of planning, since everybody was out of place. Strictly the scout should have led up the banking (back towards where the elephant spotted earlier might have been), but the ladies got ahead of him. The guide should then have brought up the rear, which in practice he almost did, before realising that he needed to climb back down to forcibly collect the writer who was still admiring the lion (which at this point woke up, and quietly slipped away into the bush). A much more dangerous moment, fully illustrating the need to put absolute trust in your guide was brought out to us recently, in Zambia’s North Luangwa National Park, when we suddenly came upon a large pride of lions feeding on a freshly killed buffalo, down a slope just ahead of us (which is why we hadn’t previously seen them). The pride just went berserk, half of them boiling up the slope at us, with some of the females leading the cubs off to one side for safety, so they were obviously taking it all quite seriously. The scout simply confronted them, holding his rifle at the ready, keeping them down below, while the rest of us backed off shouting at the tops of our voices, until the scout rejoined us, smiling broadly: all in a day’s work to him, but a moment of supreme fear – and joy – for me.
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