When both Juma and Katie were back in the jeep, David asked her if she felt better.
She kissed him on his cheek. “I never felt bad,” she told her husband. “I had to go to the bathroom. Big difference. Also?”
Everyone waited.
“On the other side of that brush? Two of the cutest little dik-dik antelopes appeared out of nowhere on the rocks. They couldn’t have been more than a foot and a half tall. I may have a flush toilet in California, but I see nothing like that from the bathroom window.”
“Maybe you will when we’re settled in at the ranch,” David said.
She arched a single eyebrow. “Unlikely.”
They continued in silence for the next ten minutes, except for when Juma would point out animals to them: buffaloes or baboons, a crocodile in the shallow waters of the river near dozens of dozing hippopotamuses （some with birds picking the bugs off their backs）， warthogs with their babies, and all kinds of vultures. A lappet-faced vulture in one tree, an Egyptian in another, and a pair of Ruppell’s in a third. His eyesight astonished Peter. His own vision was a disaster without his eyeglasses, but this old guide saw things like a solitary cheetah or a lone rhinoceros at incredible distances.
Suddenly Juma started to accelerate, racing across the track in the savanna cut by countless other Land Rovers and jeeps, and Peter and Reggie exchanged glances. Their guide, with that remarkable sixth sense of his, knew something was about to happen. There was something they had to see, and so it didn’t matter how badly he bounced them around in the back of the vehicle. In the distance, Peter noted the other Rover was paralleling them, plunging ahead with the same ferocity. And then, a moment later, there it was. Juma screeched to a stop on the southern side of the Mara River, kicking up dust, and Muema, who was driving the other vehicle—the one with Felix and Carmen and Billy and Margie—halted right beside them. Across the river, perhaps a hundred yards distant, were thousands of wildebeest pacing back and forth along the northern bank and many hundreds of zebras. A few at the front were staring into the water, some pawing at the dirt where the bank started a twenty-foot slope into the river.
Juma took out his binoculars but remained behind the wheel. So did Muema in the other Land Rover. But the nine Americans all stood on their seats and looked over the sides of the vehicles, the open roofs raised a good two feet above them. Peter got out his Leica and studied the animals through the camera. Reggie was using a twin-lens Rolleiflex that managed to look both like a boxy antique and a complicated tool for an astronaut.
“What are they waiting for?” David asked. “Why are they just standing there on the northern bank?”
“They want to be sure it’s safe,” Katie answered, and Peter watched Juma nod approvingly. “Or as safe as possible. There might be crocodiles in the water. Or a big cat waiting to grab one in all that high grass here on the southern side.” David handed her the binoculars they had brought and, like Juma, she scanned the herd and the water before it.
After Peter had taken a photo, he let the camera hang like a medallion across his chest and reached into his pants pocket for his cigarettes and lighter. He hadn’t smoked since breakfast because his doctor had told him he’d live longer if he stopped. But now that he had taken a picture of the wildebeest massing and all they could do was wait, he grew bored, which was usually when he smoked.
As he was snuffing out the cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest of the door, the crossing began. The animals started to run down the steep bank in three spots, a thunderous, three-column charge that caused the Land Rover to rock gently.
“It’s like an earthquake,” said Terrance.
The northern side of the river grew veiled by dust, but the shallow water, which had been so still a moment ago, began churning as the wildebeest tried to run or dogpaddle across it, some snorting and bellowing, others splashing forward in silence as best they could. Soon the first animals were climbing the southern bank and continuing across the plain, utterly oblivious to the pair of Land Rovers or simply not caring. Only when they were a quarter mile away did they pause: they were eating, Peter realized, calm and content. Little by little, more of the animals joined them.
“Looks like they’re all going to make it,” David said, and Peter couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or relieved. But it didn’t matter, because no sooner had David spoken than everyone in the car saw that he was mistaken. Katie let out an actual, nontheatrical gasp: a lioness had leapt from the high grass no more than twenty feet from where they were parked and pulled a wildebeest from the queue and wrestled it to the ground. The victim kicked his legs into the air for an agonizing half minute, because the lioness hadn’t killed the animal quickly by ripping a hole through his neck. Instead, she wrapped the wildebeest’s whiskered snout—mouth and nose—in her jaws.