Another ranger and I each had a small group of guests so we decided to join up into one walking party, and headed west following the elephants. Before long we had located the herd we sought, feeding peacefully on a ridge of the hill side, about 30 metres below us, and 40 metres distant. After a few minutes of watching the elephants from our vantage point, one of the guests pointed at a thicket just above the elephants on the ridge. "What is that?" he asked. We trained our binoculars to the thicket he pointed out, and to our surprise and pleasure we saw a small female leopard. The excitement of the group was immense, almost electric, but we kept everyone quiet and we all crouched lower so as to remain unobserved by this beautiful and elusive cat. There was no real chance of that though as her attention was firmly on the elephants, she seemed to be enjoying the sighting as much as we were. After a few moments the leopardess stood up, and moved slowly and silently towards us. We looked at each other in amazement, as this was not something either of us had ever experienced before. Fortunately she stopped about 20 metres from us, still watching the ellies. No one in the group dared breathe, and if we had dropped a pin you definitely would have heard it (I can’t think why one would have a pin on a bush walk though).

The leopardess seemed to grow bored with the elephants after a few minutes and got up, turned around and walking straight past her original thicket and disappeared over the ridge, leaving us to decide as a group whether this wonderful event had really occurred, or if it was merely a figment of our collective imagination. An exited group of rangers and guests we were indeed and on our way back to the vehicle we were chatting and laughing at our mornings event’s so much that we lost track of our direction slightly, but soon corrected veering to the north east, and the vehicles. Then there was a yell. "My eyes, a cobra has got me!" The other ranger, who was leading had passed between two thickets, and felt a wet, then burning sensation on his face and eyes. We moved away from the area quickly, in order to administer first aid, and cleaned his face with water and poured a litre or two of water onto his eyes to flush the venom out. A few minutes later he felt well enough to continue. We went to the area where the cobra had spat at him, and, amazingly he got spat at again, right in the eye! I was now close enough to observe the whole incident as I was right behind him, and quickly realized that the unfortunate ranger had not in fact been spat at by a cobra. We cleaned out his eyes again and I then took him to his cobra. It was in fact a special type of management tool known as an Automatic Ox-pecker, which when stepped upon administers a dose of tick repellent from a small concealed hose pipe aimed to hit the stomach of passing antelope. This was what he had stepped on, twice! It was a very embarrassed ranger that led us back to the vehicles afterwards, and he still has not lived it down.