It is a few minutes past midday and Fig’s daughter is napping on a tree. Her food — a half-eaten Thomson’s gazelle — is tucked up in tree branches. We park our tour van and stare at its beautiful, clean, whitish velvety underbelly. She is the first leopard that I have effortlessly seen in the wild, just minutes after landing at ol Kiombo airstrip in the Maasai Mara.
She deliberately ignores us as if she is used to mingling with humans long before we came, and that this moment is not as significant to her as it is to us. So, she allows us to stare. We could have stared for as long as it comfortably slept on a branch, but we drive deep into the savannah to Olare Mara Kempinski, a boutique establishment on the banks of River Ntiaktiak.
