Part Nine: The Footage
The woman who had been recording uploaded the footage that evening.
She had not planned to — or rather, she had planned the upload as a private matter, a record for herself of something she had witnessed, not as something she was offering to anyone else. But she had shown it to her travel companion, and her travel companion had shown it to a colleague on a messaging application, and the colleague had asked if it could be shared, and she had said yes, and by the following morning it was on platforms she had not uploaded it to and in languages she did not speak.
Samuel heard about this from the reserve’s communications coordinator, who called him the following morning to let him know.
He watched the footage once, on the coordinator’s computer in the reserve’s main office. It was approximately eight minutes long. The recording quality was good — the woman had a camera that was designed for wildlife photography and had a lens that handled the distance well. You could see the cub in the water. You could see Samuel going in. You could see the pride emerging from the vegetation on both banks in a way that the footage made look, he thought, even more simultaneous than it had felt in real time.
You could see the mother approaching. You could see the cub transfer. You could see the nose and the tongue.
You could see him sitting on the bank afterward with his hands shaking.
“It’s been viewed about four million times,” the coordinator said.
Samuel looked at her.
“Four million,” he said.
“As of this morning.” She paused. “It’ll be more by tonight.”
He thought about this for a moment.
“It should be about the cub,” he said. “Not about me.”
“It’s about both,” she said. “That’s probably why people are watching.”
He left the office and walked back out onto the reserve.
The morning was already warm. The post-rain green was advancing — more visible than two days ago, covering more of the pale baseline grass. The birds were doing what birds do in the post-rain days, which was to be everywhere and audible at considerable distance. He could smell the wet earth and the green things and the particular smell that the savanna produces in the morning, which he had been smelling for fourteen years and which still, when he paid attention to it, produced in him something that was not quite happiness and not quite gratitude but was adjacent to both.
He thought about four million people watching a man in a river with a lion cub on his shoulder.
He thought about what they were seeing when they watched it. The cub, probably — the small, wet, desperate animal that a stranger had carried through a fast river. The pride emerging — the drama of it, the specific visual intensity of seven lions on two banks above a man in the water. The mother’s approach, which in the footage had a quality of the extraordinary that it had also had in person.
He thought about what they were not seeing: the four months of drought before the rains, which had concentrated the animals around the remaining water in ways that made encounters like this more likely. The fourteen years of accumulated knowledge that had told him, in the six minutes of standing still, the specific things to do and not do. The fact that the outcome could have been different, and that the difference between the outcomes that were possible in that river had not been heroism but attention — the sustained, fourteen-year attention that he had given to this landscape and these animals, which had deposited in him the knowledge that the situation required.
He thought about his daughter’s drawing on the refrigerator.
He thought about the cub, which was with its mother, which was somewhere in the vegetation on the other side of the river, which was alive.
He stood in the savanna and let the morning be the morning around him.
He had said, to the tourists, before they drove away from the river: for moments like this, it’s worth risking everything. He had meant it when he said it and he meant it now, though the meaning had a more complicated texture than the words in their brevity could contain. Not the risk exactly — he was not someone who sought risk as an end in itself. But the specific quality of having been fully present in a moment that demanded everything, and having had the resources to meet what the moment demanded, and having come through to the other side of it.
That was not a feeling he would have been able to produce by any other means.
He turned and walked back into the reserve, following a path he had followed hundreds of times, in the morning light of the savanna after rain, which was as beautiful as it had ever been.
— End —
