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animals and insects are very different. As a general rule, the insects of Southwest Africa, whose barren and melancholy shores Namibia fronts, are relatively harmless. For one thing, they’re too busy trying to collect enough moisture to stay alive to spend time producing poisons. But the animals—ah, the animals . . .
    You know you’re not in Arizona when a pack of baboons runs across the highway in front of your car.
    Yes, Arizona has its predators. Foremost is the cougar, or mountain lion, star of many a Hollywood film and hysterical news report as well as innumerable nature documentaries. Then there is its smaller cousin, the bobcat. The Mexican wolf has been reintroduced in Arizona, with sporadic success. If infrequent rare sightings are to be believed, the occasional solemn and ghostly jaguar also intermittently crosses the border from Mexico to hunt, mate, and scout ancient traditional territories from which single-minded ranchers expelled it a hundred years ago. There are also foxes and, most notably, the ubiquitous coyote. Contrary to its enduring and endearing cartoon adventures, the coyote is far too smart to engage in futile pursuit of lightening-quick roadrunners when the countryside is full of plump rabbits, nut-stuffed ground squirrels, and more frequently these days, clueless suburbanite mini-mutts.
    But from there the larger mammalian population of Namibia diverges sharply from its Arizona relations. Perhaps it’s just as well. One wonders at the psychic shock a pack of American coyotes would suffer were they suddenly to be confronted by a foraging elephant.
    Far from the overdeveloped, overpopulated centers of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, Namibia still boasts healthy numbers of leopards, lions, jackals, hyenas, and numerous smaller carnivores. For many people, the most admirable member of the Namibian pantheon of predators is that fastest and most gracile of all the big cats: the cheetah ( Acinonyx jubatus ). Sleek of line, limber of build, with a strikingly marked face that is more doglike than that of any other feline, the patient cheetah was a favored pet of ancient Egyptian nobility. Or so the legends say.
    It’s difficult for those of us who are non-royalty to envision successfully keeping a big cat as a pet. At one time or another, my wife and I have shared our home with half a dozen house cats that lumped together wouldn’t weigh as much as a healthy cheetah’s full belly. The outrageous thought of having one of the pharaoh’s favorites freely roaming the kitchen and the rest of the house was a notion destined to remain forever a fragment of little more than dreams and fantasy.
    Until I met Felix.
    I had not been in Namibia very long, and I can’t remember who it was who recommended that on my way north to the Etosha National Park I should stop and pay a visit to the Mount Etjo Safari Lodge, but a glance at the map showed that it was not terribly far off the main highway. And at 150 miles from the capital, Windhoek, it would make a nice break in the journey to the famed wildlife reserve. Unsure of the driving time, the condition of the highway, or much else in this strange new land that looked exactly like my home state, I figured I could easily give the place a pass if I found myself running short on time.
    My informant told me that the turn-off was well marked. And so it was. A few hours out of Windhoek and already in the middle of nowhere, I came upon a large sign indicating that the lodge lay about twenty-five miles almost due west of where I was parked. Standing outside my vehicle flanked by mountains, high veldt, and little else, I took stock of my surroundings. Even here, on the side of the most important road in the country, there was virtually no traffic. This is understandable once one realizes that for Namibia the highway connection southward to South Africa is of far more significance than any need to reach Angola by road.
    I was tired, but not exhausted. Should I