Allan Savory crawled through the dense brush, feeling for indentations beneath the leaves, signs of a lion. Two hired trackers from Botswana had long abandoned the quest, so it was up to him to capture the predator that was killing local cattle.
For several hours, Savory tracked both the lion and the trackers. Past the point where trackers lost the path and veered away, he kept on, following “grains of sand on top of fallen leaves,” he says. But eventually, the sand dwindled to nothing. In the teak forest, nightfall was approaching. He was losing the light.
As a ranger with the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the 1950s, Savory frequently found himself on the trail of rogue elephants and man-eating lions. For particularly high-risk fauna, the rangers usually relied on native trackers. Savory noticed, however, that when it came to lions, particularly those that developed a ...
