We scramble out of our narrow camper bed well before sunrise, glad to escape its sliding seat pillows we again tried last night to tie together with a nylon rope, and drive off to forage for images.
It is a difficult undertaking, since Etosha National Park in Namibia is a flat expanse of a sparsely overgrown desert with no eye-boggling sand dunes, soaring rocky outcrops and fat glistening rivers. Instead, the park embraces an enormous salt pan, now dry and wrinkled with cracked mud, and scores of dense clusters of low trees and shrubs, mostly armed with sharp spikes and all dusty and inhospitable. But never mind the thorns. The park rules forbid visitors from leaving their vehicles and looking for wildlife on foot, so either some animals come to you, turn just the way you want them without overlapping or dropping their noses behind a rock, and do exactly what you hope -- and wish-- and pray -- they would do, or you will get nothing at all. Again. And again.
From time to time, other park visitors report some miraculous sightings we are always too late or too early to see: a baby black rhino killed by four young lions, a bunch of zebras swimming in a waterhole, a leopard scouting the thicket...
It is easy to get discouraged.
And now it is another noon hour, the time of pesky black shadows and bleached rocks and bland sky; never kind to our pictures or, come to think of it, to us. We try another waterhole, flat and silvery, with a band of white rocks dotting its banks and a fringe of dark trees forming another horizontal strip which, should any animal appear, would dissect its background in all the wrong places. There are also some distant giraffes, standing like tall sentinels amidst the horizontal landscape of Africa, resting, or drinking. This is a lovely and soothing view, but hardly inspiring: the light is truly bad, the animals distant and mostly in repose.
There is a movement. Now!
All elongated thin legs and improbably tall necks, two baby giraffes suddenly go berserk with their joy of speed, galloping together across the sun drenched desert. Running is not uncommon, of course, and many young animals run, and run often, but what we see here is a superbly coordinated chaos of flying limbs, snaking long necks and flapping short tails, followed by a cloud of pale dust.
The babies jump and twist and reverse directions not unlike superbly trained figure skaters, and gallop with their mouth open, sucking in the arid desert air of Namibia. Unlike their mothers, they do not spend much time drinking: since they are still suckling they do not yet depend on water for sustenance and get enough moisture with their diet of milk.
And -- a surprise. Even from a distance we see the giraffes' baby horns are bristling with stiff black hairs covering the bony tops. These are females: the tops of male giraffe horns are always bare. And this is our surprise, because such playful behavior among large and powerful herbivores is usually a domain of young males, while females are often calmer and seem to regard such antics with a hint of disapproval.
But perhaps these two young giraffes are among those who defy this pattern of restrain, even though their future lives of long pregnancies and rearing of the young may force them to use their energy only when it seems to make sense in terms of survival. Or perhaps they are simply less watchful and self-aware, and a bit more crazy than some others. No one will ever know. ©Yva Momatiuk
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