I have hunted a lion. A lioness, actually. “It won’t be easy, finding her,” Jamy Traut had told me. It wasn’t. She had all of southern Africa to roam. We didn’t. She hunted at night. We couldn’t. Her prints might have reeled her in, had we
found them. We hadn’t. We saw lions. Sneaking up on one sprawled in the shade of a low bush, I photographed the bush from the other side, at 25 steps. No part of the 400-pound beast was visible in the frame. “We might as well be looking for a field mouse in Montana,” I said. Jamy had been to Montana. He grunted. A hundred twenty years ago, John Henry Patterson was twice as likely to kill. He could have shot either of two lions first. They improved those sunny odds by coming into his camps to eat. In 1498, Vasco de Gama hanged his pilot after discovering the Arab’s plot to smash the explorer’s ship on a reef spanning half the entrance to Mombasa’s harbor. Five centuries later, Patterson entered that channel. A bustling thoroughfare during the slave trade, the narrow passage cleaving island and city from Africa’s coast was then still crowded with Arab dhows. READ MORE....