Cheetah tracking

I went cheetah tracking with the kiddies as the sun went down last night. I was sitting outside my door writing a couple of e-

mails and updating my blog around 6 o’clock. I don’t get any broadband connection inside my stone hut so I have to sit outside. During the day the sun is so strong I can’t see the screen, so the only chance I get to work on the internet is late in the afternoon. All seven children from my class came running up to me as I sat outside my hut saying what I thought was “teacher, teacher, teacher”, but I soon realized they were really saying “cheetah, cheetah, cheetah”. I looked up and saw a cheetah sitting about 15 meters away from my door, right amongst the guest rooms and outside the visitors center. We all knew it was likely to be the tame three-legged cheetah out for a walk with Stoffle (the assistant manager at the guest house), but it seemed like a fun idea to track the cheetah. So I grabbed my video camera and got the children to follow the cheetah’s tracks down towards the riverbed. There had been a couple of days of rain, so there was quite a bit of water in the river. The children took off their shoes and followed the “rhino tracks” wading up the river to the big pond that lies at the bottom of the small rock plateau where the main guest house sits. The kids had a metal fish trap and were puddling around trying to catch me a fish. It was so much fun. I got some great video of the ragamuffin bunch of Herero kids playing in the water and climbing on the rocks. It’s beautiful down on the river bed. There was a full moon rising and a bunch of animals swaggering by for a drink. Then poor little Denzel, the smallest of the group, tripped and fell into the water. He was shivering badly, and looked so sad. I didn’t really think he was in danger of hypothermia (considering it was 27 degrees C), but I thought I had better get him home. I took the poor chap by the hand and we all wandered back down the river bed, past the three-legged cheetah enclosure (just so we could say we found him) and home in time for supper. At dinner I heard the owner tell the same story for the 5th time. The wildlife volunteer had thought she heard lions one night, but it turns out that the male ostrich can make a sound very similar to the roar of a lion. The story gets longer and more involved each time it’s told – all about the hapless wildlife volunteer who couldn’t tell a bird from a lion. I did my laundry today. The air is so dry that my clothes were bone dry in three hours while hanging in my closet in a dark room. It’s a good thing I didn’t bother to bring a hair dryer. Ten minutes in the sun does the trick.