A Morning of Small Things

Some mornings the park doesn't hand you a headline. No leopard on the track, no elephant at the bend. June can be like that — hot, still, the interior gone to dust and pale grass.

So we slowed down and looked closer. A bee-eater turning insects against a branch. A mongoose family crossing the road in a hurry, single file. A changeable hawk-eagle watching all of it from a dead kumbuk, unbothered by us.

The couple in the back had come hoping for a leopard, and I understood that. But by the second hour they had stopped scanning the horizon and started watching what was in front of them. That shift — from chasing to noticing — is the whole reason I run the drives the way I do.

We never found anything you'd call dramatic. We found a great deal, all the same.

— Amavin