WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
By KISHA FERGUSON (continued from previous page)

 Although it's winter now, the temperatures remain settled around a relatively cool 23*C during the day. There is not enough heat to slow either us or the animals down, but enough to cause waves on the landscape, making it dance from side to side. Aside from the hum of the engine it's dead quiet out here. There is no roaring. No wild baboon calls, or not a lot of them anyway. The hills do not seem alive with activity. That only occurs in fits and spurts, usually at night when the animals are hunting.

 At the moment, everything is still. Motionless. But it is in the silence and the stillness that danger lies -- in the high grass, and maybe only a few feet in front of you. A lioness asleep, camouflaged in the tendrils of brush. The drama here is in the tension between stillness and sudden arousal.

 For many of us, nature documentaries were our introduction to wild places. But these shows, featuring well-edited dramas of animals on the hunt, in combat or acting out dominance plays, too often come across like Hollywood's version of the bush. The danger they portray is too immediate. In the bush, it's far more subtle. A fuzzy caterpillar picked off a tree trunk can kill you. A trip across a fallen branch can break your ankle, rendering you easy prey. There's the very real danger of dehydration if ill-prepared. It ain't sexy like on television. In reality, you're more likely to see dozens of animal hindquarters than an excited pride of lions chasing down an impala.

 Lee is a fitting guide in this land of alpha males, diesel-chugging Land Rovers and guns powerful enough to stop an elephant. A 26-year-old ranger at Sabi Sabi Game Reserve, he's ruggedly handsome in his goatee and long sideburns, but dispenses wisdom about the bush in a fairly soft-spoken, no-nonsense manner. He once taught his fiancee how to strip and rebuild an AK-47 blindfolded.

 Sabi Sabi, which is ecologically integrated with neighbouring Kruger National Park, lies on the banks of the Sabie River and is part of the much larger Sabie Sand Game Reserve, one of South Africa's oldest and largest private reserves. Less than a hundred years ago, so many wild areas abounded that the idea of protecting them, and the animals who roamed there, was not taken seriously. The number of animals in the wilds of southern Africa declined with the expansion of white settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kruger National Park's creation in 1898 acknowledged this process, but could barely begin to address many of the developments of the new century.

 Now bringing visitors to see the animals in places like Sabi Sabi is considered key to conservation. "We're dependent on the people who come to visit us," Lee explains while sitting on an outcropping of rock, his rifle nestled against his shoulder. "Otherwise the animals wouldn't have a commercial value, and unfortunately that's what it's gotten down to in this modern Africa. If the animals didn't have some kind of a benefit to people, then there wouldn't be a place for them, and this land would be taken over for cattle and things like that."

As a result the role of the ranger... story continued.