Wild Dog

At the entrance to the Angata Kiti there stands a rock the Maasai call Nasera. To the best of anyone's knowledge its overhang has been used by hunter-gatherers for at least 10,000 years.

On 5 March, Aajte ('Inky' for short) Geertsema, a Dutch girl who was working at Ndutu studying Serval cats, took her parents and some friends from Arusha across to the Gols for the day. Quite why she went there at just that time I do not know. But anyway, that afternoon they came across 1 female and 3 male hunting dogs. She recognized them as belonging to the Genghis Pack, so called by Jane and Hugo Van Lawick when studying them a few years previously. They were Marcus, Homer and Jinja, accompanying their breeding female Kali. Inky followed them until they settled into the den where, shortly afterwards, Kali was to give birth to her litter of thirteen pups. Jinja, Inky reported, wore a radio telemetry collar placed there some time ago by the Serengeti Research Institute and long since non-operational. I thought that the presence of this might prove to be a nuisance when filming them - it would hardly look wild or natural - but decided I would face that when it happened.

It was, to say the least of it, a monumental piece of luck. A day earlier or later, even an hour's difference in timing, and in all probability the pack would have denned and had their puppies out there in the wilderness and no one would have had the faintest idea they were there.