Allan Savory crawled through the dense brush, feeling for indentations beneath the leaves, signs of a lion. Two hired trackers from Botswana had long abandoned the quest, so it was up to him to capture the predator that was killing local cattle.
For several hours, Savory tracked both the lion and the trackers. Past the point where trackers lost the path and veered away, he kept on, following “grains of sand on top of fallen leaves,” he says. But eventually, the sand dwindled to nothing. In the teak forest, nightfall was approaching. He was losing the light.
As a ranger with the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the 1950s, Savory frequently found himself on the trail of rogue elephants and man-eating lions. For particularly high-risk fauna, the rangers usually relied on native trackers. Savory noticed, however, that when it came to lions, particularly those that developed a taste for humans, the trackers invariably “lost” the trail to avoid an encounter. If he was to do his job, he had to teach himself to track.
Thus it was that he now found himself at dusk on his hands and knees, maneuvering through the undergrowth, drawing on what he’d learned from observing native trackers and the nuances of the landscape to help him catch a wild animal that could very well kill him. He continued creeping along the forest floor for some 30 or 40 yards until he came to a narrow part of the bush that the lion had gone through.
“So I crawled through very quietly, but being so narrow, I had to push my rifle ahead of me,” Savory recalls. He didn’t want to go any deeper into the bush with the rifle’s safety catch on. He released it as gently as he could, but the click was still audible. “The lion heard that, so it growled and rushed off,” he says. It was only 10 yards ahead.
