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The cattle are still stirring inside the safety of their enclosures when Saitoti Petro Lorkuta makes his morning rounds, threading his motorbike through the communal Maasai pastures east of Tanzania’s Tarangire national park. Every so often, he cuts the engine, crouches low and reads the dust, scanning the trails between patches of dense scrub and below the umbrella-shaped canopies of acacia trees for the tell-tale print of a lion’s paw.
As a child, Lorkuta (pictured below) wondered whether he would ever see a lion roaming the savannahs of his homeland. Maasai elders told tales of legendary hunts, proudly displaying old battle scars, but the roar of the big cats had all but vanished from the rangelands’ nocturnal soundtrack of elephants, zebras, whooping hyenas and grunting buffalo.
Today, aged 35, encounters with lions are an increasingly common – and welcomed – part of Lorkuta’s life. And instead of proving his Maasai warrior mettle with a spear, he prefers a quieter test of courage: a stare-off.
