Tanzania Journal, part 6

In which our intrepid explorers are punked by a jerk leopard

Thursday

As I mentioned in the last post, we were not allowed out of our tents on Wednesday night because of a visitor. I will come back to that, for reasons which will become clear.

Thursday was a somewhat frustrating day. Let me explain why.

We got up at 6:30 so we could breakfast and get ready for a 8:00 a.m. game drive. Eugene headed us out past the lake to view a large male lion that was laying in the grass. Which was cool. But what we were really looking for this day was a leopard.

Of all the famous animals on the African plains, the leopard is the hardest to spot (get it?). Cheetah sightings are relatively rare, but leopards take hide-and-seek game to the next level.

In the first place, there just aren’t that many of them. In the second, they are solitary. In the third they are camera shy. They hide in the trees and rarely are seen walking on the ground.

We had looked for them bootlessly the day before, but now Eugene heard of a leopard hanging out in a tree, with a fresh kill hung in the branches. Leopards, you see, often have their lunch taken by lions, so they resort to dragging them up into the tree so they have their pantry stocked for a week undisturbed.

We found the leopard. It wasn’t hard since the tree was surrounded by at least a dozen other jeeps who also wanted to get a view of the elusive feline. And, sure enough, a young wildebeest carcass hung in the branches below the canopy.

And where was the leopard? Well, here is the best shots I got:

This is with my phone zoomed in as far as it will go. The cat was just laying in the top of the canopy, barely visible to the tourist paparazzi below. And apparently with no interest in coming down so we could get a better view.

Eugene quickly identified it as a large male. And we believed him, for this man has an uncanny ability to immediately detect the species, gender and age of some animal that looks like a blip on the horizon to us American city-folk. Our conversations went something like this.

Eugene: look in the distance at your 11 o’clock, you will see a three year old male cheetah who hasn’t eaten for a week.

Me (squinting into my binoculars): Ummm….I see two spots. Do you mean the one on the right or left?

Eugene: On the left; the spot on the right is a tree.

Me: gotcha.

So we trusted Eugene when he said the leopard would likely come down if we were patient. And we were indeed patient. We waited for 90 minutes and the leopard had not budged.

We decided to give the leopard a name. Dave suggested “Zacchaeus” since our hope was that he would indeed come down from the tree. But eventually “Larry” was settled upon. Larry Leopard. He looked like a Larry.

Eugene heard a report of some cheetahs nearby so we decided to check them out and then return to the Larry. I got some better pics than I had previously of cheetahs.

After admiring their beauty for a while we returned to the leopard tree and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Larry was refusing to come down so we could take a nicer look at him. He just sat up there in the branches as if he cared nothing at all that we had flown from Indiana to see him and maybe take a couple photos.

After a few hours some of our crew talked about leaving. But Eugene implied this was a really rare opportunity, and it would be a shame to come this far and this close to seeing a leopard and then leave.

And there was a certain logic in this. After all, this was the only large animal we had not seen. And we probably never get this chance again, even in the unlikely event that we return for another safari. If we were ever going to see a leopard in the wild, this was our one shot.

So the Great Leopard Stake-Out continued.

It wasn’t as boring as you would think. Amy and I had really gotten to enjoy Katie and Dave and our conversation was fun. We reminisced about growing up in the 70’s, about the dumb sitcoms of that time, of school lunches (especially those square pizzas that were objectively terrible but were still my cafeteria favorite). Mitch and Sarah must have thought they wandered into a AARP convention. This went on for a long time.

And the leopard did not move.

Dave came up with a great idea: one of us should get out of the jeep, run over to the tree, and yank on the wildebeest carcass until it dropped. This should provoke some reaction from Larry. I nominated Mitch, as he was likely the fastest. But the big sissy declined. Eugene put the kabosh on the idea anyway.

So we waited some more. We reminisced some more. I decided to sing some Johnny Horton historical songs that my dad used to sing on vacation. This got no reaction from Larry but a strong (and negative) reaction from my daughter, who apparently can’t recognize great singing when she hears it from three feet away. Philistine.

Finally, after SIX HOURS (including the cheetah break) we gave up. As we started to roll away, I thought I could hear Larry say (in Leopardeese) something that sounded like, “haha, suckers”.

We got back to camp and struck up a conversation with an American couple who were also staying there. And they filled us in about the details of last night’s lockdown. The reason we could not go out of our tents is because something had been spotted on their porch. What was it?

A leopard.

And since Eugene had said there would likely be only one leopard in this territory, that meant it had to have been…

Larry.

Who is probably still laughing his head off.