WHERE THE LION ROARS

FLYING WITH MACK AIR IN BOTSWANA

- Sam Weigel

It was a blindingly bright afternoon on the edge of the Okavango Delta—warm and sunny on this July winter day. Our Land Rover Defender chugged along the dirt track that paralleled and crisscrossed a reedy canal, occasionally turning muddled and confused among a profusion of game trails trampled through the ocher sea of grass by ever-present herds of impala, lechwe, sable, kudu, and the massive 6-ton African elephants that eyed our Landy like a smaller interloper that might potentially need to be a runoff. Our attention, however, was focused on the tree line to our left. We stopped every few minutes, and my eagle-eyed wife Dawn scanned the bush with her binoculars.

Twenty minutes before, we’d passed a Toyota 4Runner coming the opposite direction, carrying a South African father and son who told us they’d spotted an elusive cheetah stalking along this tree line. We’d seen most of the other notable species of African wildlife over the past two weeks but desperately wanted to see a cheetah. As I turned onto a side trail that meandered toward the tree line, I heard a familiar drone over the rhythmic thump of the Land Rover’s diesel engine. It was a Mack Air Cessna 206, scribing an arc a thousand feet overhead. We were east of the bush camps, so they were likely on a sightseeing tour. Had they spotted the big cat for which we were searching? I thought back to three days earlier, when we’d flown over this very area in another Mack Air 206.