Every day at Sasakwa I got up and looked out at the savanna. Every day I drove down into it with Lee Fuller, at dawn and again after tea. Sometimes we followed a frail watercourse, sometimes a well-travelled track through the woodland.
I saw lions mating again and again (and again) and a herd of elephants turning blue – all but their tusks – in the swift, equatorial dusk. I watched a cheetah kill a Thomson’s gazelle using the wildebeest herd to conceal its approach. I saw impala in the high grass, and I could feel their nervousness, but I didn’t really understand it until the morning when Fuller and I got out of the Land Rover and walked up the nearly dry bed of the Grumeti River.
Fuller carried a .416 Rigby rifle, a very big gun by American standards. For a couple of hours, I felt like prey. We stood under baboon roosts. We examined hyena and leopard tracks. We watched fork-tailed drongos (black, iridescent birds) attack a young martial eagle. We considered the blossoms of Acacia tortilis and felt the leathery leaves of an abutilon. Then we drove some more.
One morning, Fuller and I were driving down the hill before dawn, slipping out of the woodland and into the open, a clear, blue day ahead. Fuller said, with satisfaction, “Just us and 140,000 hectares.” I knew exactly how he felt.