The Lion and the Buffalo (a true story about narratives)

Driving through the basin of the Ngorongoro crater my eyes caught a flash of tan and dun in the middle of an ocean of green. Lion. Not one, not two, but three young male lions lay in the grass, all rippling muscle and coiled strength. All at once, they looked up and turned in the same direction. There in the distance was a solitary buffalo, a hundred metres away, separated from its herd, grazing calmly, a picture of pastoral bliss.

You could feel the sudden tension in the air as the buffalo slowly made its way towards the lions, oblivious to the lurking danger. Eighty metres. Then seventy. The lions stood in turn and then crouched low into the grass. And yet the buffalo kept walking ever closer. My mind went back to stories real and imagined, read and seen from childhood, reinforced in vignettes from documentaries. I waited for the random brutality of life in the Savannah, the age old story of predator and prey to be played out before my eyes. My mind was transported into the future that lay a few minutes away, all golden flash and tooth and claw and blood, the inevitability of of life and death, of hunger and survival, played out before my eyes, a story of life itself, millennia old, compressed into fifteen violent seconds. 

The buffalo drew closer. Forty metres now. The lions crouched lower, hidden, sniffing at the air, all twitch and excitement compered to the buffalo’s naive serenity. And then suddenly it happened. In a flash, the lions scattered, turning away and speeding into the bush, skulking away in fear. The buffalo grazed on. And the sun climbed higher in the morning sky. 

An adult buffalo weighs seven hundred kilograms. An adult male lion weighs between two hundred and two hundred and forty kilograms. A lion never attacks a buffalo alone. They don’t dare. They attack in a pack, like hyenas, in groups of four or five or six. Only one lion faces a buffalo, distracting it, while the others try and creep up from behind, hoping to grab the buffalo’s legs while it faces the other way and so weaken it enough for the others to jump at it from behind, and hopefully collectively overcome the buffalo’s sheer strength, size and power. It is the only way to attack the majestic buffalo, through deception and as a mob. The three young lions I saw never had a chance. They saw death in the glint of the buffalo’s pointed horns, the sharp end of a spear wielded by seven hundred kilos of pure, raw muscle, of a power that is hard to imagine to those of us raised with bucolic tales of bovine passivity. 

Oh the tales we are told and the things we believe and the stories we tell. Of the king of the jungle and the brave lion. Of alphas and apex predators and prey and victims. 

The circle of life that exists beyond life and death is that of convenient stereotypes and ignorant lies. Maybe it’s time we looked more deeply at the stories we tell, the stories we listen to, the stories we believe.