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here we could barely see another human because the ranch was so vast.
    Somewhere in front of us was a large tour bus filled with eager onlookers – I knew this because I’d seen it leave about ten minutes before our jeep – but it was nowhere to be seen now, and I easily imagine myself almost alone in the Serengeti. And at a fraction of the cost of a trip to Africa, I could see why Badrock Park was so popular.
    It was true what Ortiz had said back in Albuquerque – Badrock’s idea of mixing predators and prey was controversial to say the least. Some people – including the directors of most zoos in the United States – were up in arms over the affair. On the other hand though, there were many that approved of Badrock’s maverick stance, claiming that a natural approach was the best to follow and citing the success of Africa’s own game reserves as proof of how it could work. Badrock Park was a much smaller operation perhaps, but a lot of people believed that the principle should hold true there as much as it did at Kruger or Okavango.
    There wasn’t much of the circus about it either, if truth be told. From Ortiz’s description, I had envisaged crowds baying for blood as buffalo were herded toward the water’s edge, to be attacked en masse by crocodiles. But instead it was just as Badrock himself claimed – nature taking its course. He had just invited people onto the property to watch it happen, but he wasn’t manufacturing any of it.
    Safety concerns from local residents about the predators escaping were groundless – as well as fifteen feet high double perimeter fencing running the entire forty-mile perimeter of the ranch, the rivers flowing through the property were also netted to prevent the crocodiles leaving, while allowing fish and smaller marine animals to move through.
    The male lion was far behind us now, and I felt the bumpy ride of the jeep easing up as we came to a stop.
    ‘There,’ the guide said in his strong accent, pointing across the grasslands to a stand of trees in the distance.
    The other three passengers and I moved to the side of the jeep and raised our binoculars to get a closer look at the troop of giraffes eating leaves from the tree branches, incredibly long necks at full stretch to reach the tastiest and most nutritious specimens.
    ‘Wow,’ the girl next to me said to her boyfriend, ‘they’re amazing.’
    ‘I know honey,’ the guy replied, mesmerized by the scene. ‘I know.’
    ‘Those four that you can see are fully grown adults,’ the guide said, ‘about twenty-one feet – hold on.’ The guide interrupted himself as his own field glasses swept left. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’ve got zebra as well, a whole herd of them coming up.’
    We all dutifully looked left, and were rewarded with the wonderful sight of about two dozen zebra moving gracefully across the grass.
    ‘And if you look closely,’ the guide continued, ‘about a kilometer further off and slightly to the right, you’ll see a small parade of elephant too, I see six of them.’
    I adjusted the focus on my binoculars and had a look. ‘Seven,’ I said after a quick count.
    There was a brief pause, then the guide nodded. ‘Yeah, seven mate, you’re right. Good eyes.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I said. I knew my years of close target observation in the Rangers would come in handy one day.
    It was then that my peripheral vision caught movement, and I swung the binoculars toward it. ‘What was that?’ I said as I saw the grass move again.
    ‘Where?’ the girl next to me asked. ‘Where?’
    But the guide had already seen it, and nodded his head in seeming satisfaction. ‘Where the prey goes, the predators follow,’ he chuckled to himself.
    ‘Leopard?’ the single guy asked, but the tour guide shook his head.
    ‘Dogs,’ I said, picking them up now, my eyesight just as keen as it had been on operations more than a decade before.
    ‘Yeah,’ the guide agreed. ‘African wild dogs. They hunt in packs,