Tenacious red cat

Heading out the other afternoon, going to look for Elephants, we had to go towards the Great Fish River and cross it to get to the North of the reserve. Just before we got the two roads which lead to the crossing I noticed another vehicle had beaten me to the road I wanted to take to the crossing, so saying to my guests that instead of eating this vehicles dust lets go down this other road. So while heading down this road thinking where could we start looking for the Elephants, my tracker Vuyani said there's Caracal, quickly looking to where he was pointing, I and the guests caught a glimps of this red flash shooting across the road. Now thinking that's all we're going to see of this magnificant and rare cat, approached slowly to see if we could hopefully get another look at it. To our amazement it was slowly but confidently walking along side of the road. So now i was more excited than a kid on Christmas day, the Caracal lay down and started sniffing the air and turning and fine tuning his/her ears into the surruonding bush for pottential prey and for preditors which might kill him/her. Watching this beautiful cat laying there for about 15 minutes, it decided to get up and walk infront of the vehicle and allow us to follow it down the road untill it decided to venture off the road and dissappear into the bush. having a sighting like this really blew my mind away.

Posted: Kwandwe by Craig Parsons, Date: 20 April 2008