Text 1: Stand your ground, by Hannah Ostrowski

An original contemporary newspaper travel article.

Mwila, our guide, carries a rifle that he has fired in anger exactly once in nineteen years. He tells us this on the first morning, standing in the long gold grass by the river, and then he tells us the rule that matters more than the rifle. ‘Stay close and follow my instructions. Each animal and each situation is different. We keep our distance and leave them space.’

Walking safaris are the opposite of the jeep kind. In a vehicle, animals ignore you; you are a large, smelly box. On foot, you are a small, slow mammal, and everything knows it. Every thicket might hold a buffalo. Every rustle is a decision.

On the third day we came round an ant hill and found a young bull elephant feeding forty metres away. He saw us at the same moment. His ears swung out like two grey sails, his trunk rose, and he made a noise I can only describe as a lorry braking inside a cathedral. Then he came at us.

Every part of me wanted to run. Mwila did not move. He raised one arm and spoke to the elephant in a low, firm voice, the way you might speak to a large dog that has forgotten its manners. The elephant stopped twenty metres away, shook his head so that dust flew from his ears, and stood glaring at us. My knees were shaking so badly I could hear my trouser legs flapping. After what may have been a minute, he turned, flicked his tail and wandered off to strip a bush as though we had never existed.

‘He was telling us this is his house,’ Mwila said. ‘He was right.’

That evening, by the fire, I found I could not stop smiling. I had not been brave; I had simply done as I was told. But I had been allowed, for a minute, to understand exactly where I stood in the order of things, and it was a long way from the top.

Text 2: A night among lions, by Arthur Pellow

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1879, a young man travelling by ox-wagon in southern Africa writes to his mother.

My dear Mother,

You asked me to tell you everything, and so I shall, though I beg you not to read this part to my aunt. On the night of the 9th we were outspanned beside a dry river bed, the wagon drawn up with the oxen tied to the trek chain and two great fires burning, when the oxen began to stamp and low in a manner that brought every man to his feet.

Then we heard them. I had read of the roaring of lions and fancied it something like the roaring of the lions at the Zoological Gardens. It is no such thing. It is a sound that comes up out of the ground and through the soles of your feet, and it seemed to come from every side at once. Klaas, our driver, who has lived all his life in this country, said quietly that there were three of them, and threw more wood upon the fires.

For two hours we sat back to back with our guns across our knees, peering into a darkness that was quite black beyond the circle of the firelight. Twice I saw a pair of eyes shine green and vanish. At about midnight there was a rush and a bellow, the whole team plunged against the chain, and one of the after-oxen was dragged clean out of the firelight before any of us could fire. We heard it for some minutes. I will not describe what we heard.

In the morning we found the tracks, as large as soup plates, and what was left of the poor beast. Klaas said that we had been lucky. I own I did not feel so. But I am quite well, dear Mother, and growing very brown, and you are not to worry in the least.

Your affectionate son, Arthur

Both of these texts are about encounters with dangerous wild animals.

Compare:

• what the writers say about their encounters with these animals
• how the writers present these encounters to readers

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