WE were busy cleaning our cameras when Bruce, our only two-legged visitor, arrived.
He immediately expressed a dislike for people who play loud pop music in game reserves. As we were trying to make tape-recordings of the night sounds of the bush, we couldn’t have agreed more. And when it turned out that he was a photographer, the friendship was sealed.
My new 500 mm lens was having its first outing and I was very excited about its possibilities. Kudu would now look like kudu. No more vague splodges in the undergrowth.
But my camera had been giving trouble. Just before Bruce arrived, I had managed to release the jammed shutter, but neither he nor I could do anything about the non-functioning exposure meter. Luckily I had started photography in the days before computerisation and was fairly confident that I could operate by guesswork.
In the end, one reel of guesswork slides came out very well.
The other seven got lost in the post. (Botswana had no facilities for processing transparencies and Kodak had pulled out of South Africa in protest against the apartheid regime, so our films had to be sent to Australia – and they didn’t always come back.)
We were certainly glad of the lack of loud music that night. Two male lions decided to try to set up territories on either side of our tent. We got very little sleep, but we did get some superb recordings of them roaring at each other.
In the morning we tracked one of them for quite a long way and the spoor was so fresh that I am sure we would have caught up with him, had he not headed for the landing strip.
Corrie insisted that it was against international aviation regulations to track lions down a runway!
We dubbed this pair of males ‘Arthur and Martha’ but they later became famous as ‘The Beach Boys’. They weren’t exactly queer – when an interesting female came on the scene, one or other would oblige her – but she would be left to bring up her cubs alone. Marriage was out as far as these two were concerned.
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