Kruger at dawn.
The raspy calls of red-billed francolin, timid-sounding hornbills and the grunt and blow of hippos slowly fill the crisp morning air. Hyaenas laugh uncannily, celebrating a night’s successful scavenging. Few places on earth greet an early riser with more natural splendour and sheer apprehension than a bushveld dawn.
The Kruger National Park is 360 kilometres long and 65 kilometres wide. Its two million hectares make it similar to Wales or Israel, but the comparison stops here. The African bushveld is distinctive. Ancient-looking baobab trees dot the savannah and sprawling plains of Mopani bush. Giant wild fig and jackalberry line waterways. Massive leadwood trees seemingly invite elusive leopards to drag their fresh kill up and away from competing predators. There is no end to the unfolding drama that constitutes the age-old food chain. Hard-working dung beetles, metre-tall ground hornbills, baggy-trousered elephants and yellow-eyed lions, the continents’ creatures effortlessly play their role in an endless cycle.
Armed with thermos coffee, biltong and rusks, a daybreak game drive to a secluded waterhole perfectly illustrates Africa and what it should remain. An old continent with ideally-adapted wildlife awakening to another orange-lit sky.
A tiny Scops owl, only 17 centimetres tall, utters its final nighttime prrr-prrr-prrr from a tree next to the hideout. An assortment of doves, guineafowl and spurfowl compete at the water’s edge. The turtle hanging motionlessly in the pond’s glass shows only its nostrils like holes in a button. The new dawn’s first cicadas gingerly start up, not yet incessant. Far off, zebras bray, one at first and then a chorus.
The air moving over the water is freezing when it enters the hide, bringing fresh mud odours and feline scent. Last night something happened close by — the first circling vulture knows this.