Wild life: Leopard on a hot tin roof

A leopard has been on the rampage night after night. We know her because she often lurks in the woods behind the farmstead, between the beehives and the old long-drop hut. Very occasionally, at dusk, she’s spotted lying on the hot tin roof of the big water tank on the hill above the woods — but for weeks around midnight she’s been prowling up to the goats’ boma. She leaps over high thorns and razor wire and dry-stone walls, struts along the top of the enclosure and then pounces. Livestock erupt in panic, the night watchmen shake themselves from their deep slumber and roar and rush about. The she leopard, out to feed a litter of cubs, I think, is disturbed, abandons the throat of her already killed prey in disgust and slinks off to hunt something wilder.

I love the leopard as much as the cheetah on the plains and feel a deep sense, almost of regret, that I shall never meet my end because of a buffalo goring, an elephant charge or lion mauling.