Spotless terror

The tail hanging from an acacia branch is the only sign of the leopard in the tree at Kenya's Masai Mara reserve. A closer look from your columnist shows up limbs from an impala carcass hanging limply from another thorny branch of the tree. The elusive leopard has treed his prey by the strength of his neck alone. We are both awestruck and mesmerised by the muscular cat's spotted beauty. But now the driver has to hurry us back before the rangers catch and fine him for getting too close, off the trail and on the grass, towards the big cat!

Later, when our hearts have retreated from our mouths and the adrenalin subsides somewhat, a Yoruba poet's lines learnt long ago from Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes anthology of poems The Rattlebag float up into mind: " Gentle hunter/his tail plays on the ground/while he crushes the skull.//Beautiful death/who puts on a spotted robe/when he goes to his victim//Playful killer/whose loving embrace/splits the antelope's heart."

This is sheer poetic licence at play. For the leopard never does change his spots: whether in repose or in repartee he retains the mottled pelt that Nature gave him. At most he will hide and crouch like the superbly honed instinctive predator he is. The artifice of changing into deceptive clothes to commit crimes is unknown to the beast; it only kills for food.

That cunning only comes from humans, from Norwegian lunatic killer Anders Behrig Breivik, for example. Alas, the very faculty that made us seeming pinnacles of creation has also morphed humans into monstrous killers.