A Moveable Beast

So I have a confession to make, dear reader. I haven't been fully open and honest with you. I led you to believe that I had posted the best of my game drive pictures from Maasai Mara. In reality, I've held out on you... the following series of pictures is undeniably the most badass of any that I've taken on this whole trip. I'm not even lion to you. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.




This was almost right at the beginning of our game drive. My friend Dickson knew a spot where the lions typically chill early in the morning. Sure enough, he was chilling about 15 yards from the road, allowing us to pull up right beside him. He didn't seem to be too bothered by our presence, but as more and more safari vehicles started to swarm around him like flies on dog turds, he got a little annoyed, and let out a mighty roar, which I was lucky enough capture in the above sequence of images. Yet they hardly do the event justice. Hemingway aptly describes this sensation in True at First Light, which I've been reading throughout my trip, writing: "You cannot describe a wild lion's roar. You can only say that you listened and the lion roared. It is not at all like the nose the lion makes at the start of Metro Goldwyn Mayer pictures. When you hear it you first feel it in your scrotum and it runs all the way up through your body." Suffice to say, I identify with the first 2/3s of this quote much more than the last 1/3, but at the same time, unlike Hemingway apparently, I am not in the habit of puting my junk in the general vicinty of lions' mouths.