National Geographic: Eye of the Leopard Page #2

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and they do.

It is war between them,

a battle that the marauding baboons

will take up in a heartbeat.

Each experience makes up who she is,

and arms her for the future.

For the time being,

Legadema and her mother could settle,

as the tension dissipated,

mother and cub alone together,

Legadema safe in the soft folds

of her mother's embrace.

But it was only a temporary respite.

Now that the baboons had found them,

they would visit this spot regularly,

just to make sure.

The second den was no longer safe.

It was time to move on again.

That was nearly three years ago.

And yet,

as Legadema looks out across the forest,

the distant bark of a baboon

still send shivers across her skin.

Somewhere across the forest,

her mother is ready to move.

Legadema is aware of every movement.

Something is wrong.

Leopards usually live

under a cloak of invisibility.

Her rasping calls at midday

are a betrayal of her usual disguise.

Even with so much distance between them,

Legadema recognizes the call,

a sound that from her birth signified

the protective safety of her mother.

Today it is still a magnet for her.

She must respond.

There is a certain...

conduct among leopards.

Approach carefully and discretely,

even if you are a friend...

...or you will be treated like an enemy.

So Legadema bides her time,

careful not to give herself

away to the forest,

but slowly heading north

towards the calls,

towards a meeting

that might change her life.

Legadema's delicate maneuvering towards

her mother is typical of a solitary cat's life.

She learned how to be alone

very early in life.

When she was three months old,

Legadema was already on her own

for days at a time.

It was a huge risk.

At that age, cubs are desperate to see the world,

and Legadema was no exception.

The slightest movement nearby of anything even

vaguely her fighting weight was fair game.

Some prey are not very accommodating.

Monitor lizards are quick and dangerous,

and her instincts told her to get around

behind the hissing dragon,

but when some thorns got behind her,

her confidence was destroyed.

As Legadema wandered off further and further

from where she had been left,

she went deeper into the unknown,

testing her boundaries,

but exposing herself to dangers

she could not even imagine.

Her mother had lost two cubs

like this before,

lost in an impossible maze

of fallen trees and thickets

or snatched up by some passing opportunist.

But this time alone, established the style

of life Legadema would have to lead.

She was learning to be independent.

The calls from her

mother have stopped,

but Legadema can "feel" her presence.

A distant monkey alarm pinpoints her,

the birds suddenly taking flight.

A sudden silence,

all clues that she doesn't miss.

She turns north to intercept her.

When she hears the alarm nearby,

she knows it can't be her mother.

The forest seems to

conspire against leopards,

and Legadema is as curious as any

to see what the problem is.

Monkeys litter the forest.

Because of the ideal

feeding conditions here,

each troop can virtually see

their neighbors most of the time.

Fights break out,

and Legadema leaves off going to meet

her mother to investigate the ruckus.

It's worth the distraction.

Monkeys have always held

a... special place in her heart.

Her intense interest in monkeys started when she

was just a few months old, watching her mother.

To catch a monkey is nearly impossible.

It is a mind game, a careful calculation of

how to get to the taunting little apes.

As a young impressionable cub,

Legadema watched every move

her mother made and learned.

What makes it such a challenge,

is that these agile little apes

flip lightly from tree to tree,

cleverly understanding that

the high branches can take their weight,

but cannot support a leopard.

Leopard know their limitations.

The cub's keen eyes and pliable mind had watched

every move in this three dimensional chess game.

With pawns that can leap from tree to tree

and a queen wrestling with her next move.

It was here, at this moment,

she had understood!

She was watching this queen

solve the puzzle.

The key to monkey hunting

is to control the high ground,

keep them beneath you and

out of the flimsy tree tops,

and to hunt... down!

From that moment on, she knew it too.

Command the high tree tops,

and you have your monkey.

Leopards have an uncanny ability

to visualize an ascent in an instant

and mentally plan each foothold

before they leap up a thorny tree trunk,

with a near vertical incline,

all while holding a dead-weight in their jaws.

Legadema's kill is a good one,

the monkey is alpha male.

It will throw the troop into disarray for weeks,

and make them vulnerable.

But even though her meal may last a day or two,

they will be even more alert now.

This knowledge of how to kill and how to survive,

handed down from mother to daughter,

is a legacy keeping their bloodline alive

from generation to generation.

Legadema is the only surviving cub

of this territory,

chosen by fate,

to continue that lineage forward.

On her father's side,

the Burnt Ebony male adds his own strong hunting

skills and quiet confidence to her genetic mix.

His bigger body weight allows for a wider range

of hunting than she can manage,

but his greatest skill is his ability to clinically

analyze the forest, with cold calculation.

The result is often surprising.

When the buffalo stream in from the swamp,

Burnt Ebony doesn't move away,

but chooses a parallel course.

For a leopard to hunt buffalo

would be extremely rare,

they're too larger,

much too risky to take on.

But he knows what he is doing.

In this part of the world,

the dust kicked up by a herd

is a flag, fluttering its signal

to every lion in the area.

Burnt Ebony doesn't care.

And he holds his course.

Usually leopards bolt

at the first sign of a lion,

but when he strolls on with little more

than a glance over his shoulder,

his confidence unnerves the lions.

Besides, for them the air is filled

with the scent of a more exciting prey.

His eyes miss nothing.

His ears scan for the faintest clue.

The stage is set.

Impossible prey, the area's largest predators,

and a chaotic killing field.

This is exactly what Burnt Ebony

has been waiting for.

But, he had better be aware.

The hallmark of a leopard

is his sharp mind and instincts,

cunning stealth and his cold calculation.

His signature is this death grip,

silencing his prey in an instant.

This way he can kill right under

the noses of the hunting lions,

and within a herd of buffalo,

without them even knowing he is there.

But most of all,

he sees confusion as an advantage.

The slightest smell of blood on the air

brings out the "piranhas of the bush".

But leopards can hoist twice their own

body weight vertically up a tree,

so the baby buffalo takes little effort.

But retreat is not an option

for this leopard.

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