The Long Wait for a Leopard

The first hint was a langur call from the kumbuk trees to the north — high, repeated, holding. The driver killed the engine.

Most jeeps don't wait through alarm calls. They radio them in and move on, scanning further down the track. We stayed. The calls held for twenty minutes, then thinned to nothing, then started again forty minutes later from a different tree. A leopard moving through scrub, not crossing roads.

By the second hour, three jeeps had pulled up, looked at us parked in the middle of nothing, and driven off. By the third, we were alone.

She came out of the line of scrub at the road's edge, walked the eight metres to the centre of the track, and sat down. Just sat. Front paws aligned, tail curled against her flank. The light was three hours of sun lower than when we'd arrived, and softer for it.

We stayed with her for forty minutes. She watched something we couldn't see in the brush to the south. Once, she yawned. Twice, her ears swivelled toward a sound that didn't seem to concern her. Then she stood, crossed the road in three movements, and was gone.

The photographs were the easy part. The hard part was the two hours of nothing that had to come first — sitting in the heat, watching scrub, trusting that the alarm calls meant something even when the road stayed empty.

This is what we mean by slow. Yala doesn't reward chasing. It rewards parking.

— Amavin