WordPress has changed again. Great. I had just barely gotten used to the last change and now it’s gone. This is so frustrating. But enough of my ranting about things that I can’t change, on to the post.
When I was in tenth grade, and all my classmates were studying their asses off for one of the most important exams of our lives, my family decided a trip to Gujrat was totally needed to relax from all of my not studying. I couldn’t agree more. So off we went to Ahmedabad and what not, and it was fun. A lot of fun. I got to para-glide (?), ride a camel, look at a whale’s skeleton, go to Gir, see Kutch, and almost get attacked by lionesses. Like I said, lots of fun.
Since this was the first time my family was going to see real wild lions, we were naturally very excited. So entering the sanctuary was almost like going on an adventure. It wasn’t like we’d imagined.
We stumbled across a group of lions (that was just too small to be actually called a pride) very soon. They had probably just eaten and were lazing around like they ruled the place (which I guess they did). That didn’t surprise us a lot, I mean, lions are pretty lazy creatures after all…but a man dozing off on an open tractor not ten metres away from the lions did somewhat astonish us. There he was, in a torn vest, on a rickety tractor, just laying down on it without a care in the world. As we stared at him, ignoring the lions for a while, we noticed another jeep parked a few feet away from us. A guy was sitting on the front seat, doors all open, busily scribbling something down on a notepad.
Now if the lions had wanted to go over to any of those two, they could have done so in a second. They were that close. The two brave (stupid?) people didn’t seem to care at all. When the scribbling guy saw us, he gave us a smile, walked over and chatted with the driver for a while before going back to his own jeep and resuming his scribbling. Needless to say, I was disappointed in the lions. We stared at them for a while longer, and they seemed to be enjoying rolling over on their stomachs, scratching their ears and behaving in a decidedly NOT regal way. Disillusioned by the kings of the forest, we went our own way.
I had given up on actually being awed by the lions by then, so when my dad got a call to go check out some new rest house being built some place by someone for some reason, we went with him. The rest house was on the top of a hill of some sort, and the hill was surrounded by grazing pastures (I have no idea what those grasslands where goats and sheep actually graze are called. Grazing pastures?). It was pretty, but not a particularly interesting place to be, so we decided to go back to our rest house.
On our way back, my father decided to check out the grass and see if something like that could be made near the forest he was in charge of at that time. Since that meant stomping around in long grass and getting thorns and burrs stuck to our jeans and getting them inside our shoes (which is a horrible feeling, by the way), my sister and I followed him and the couple of people that were with us. Then one guy spotted something moving.
It could have been a goat, or a sheep, or a dinosaur, but nope. It just had to be a lioness. We stared at her, she stared back. This continued for a while as we stood there, shell-shocked, few metres away from a huge carnivore obviously out for hunting, and another lioness joined her.
Now, we were not inside any sanctuary or wildlife park. Lions weren’t supposed to be there. WHAT THE HELL WERE TWO LIONESSES DOING HERE????
And then one person who was escorting us told us that earlier that afternoon five lionesses had been spotted nearby.
Oh joy.
He also told us that the other three lionesses were probably in a bush ten feet away from us.
Could it get any better?
And then he assured us that his tiny bamboo stick that wouldn’t intimidate my freaking guinea pig was enough to drive away five huge wild lionesses. For some reason, we weren’t very assured.
There were five lionesses a few metres away from us, we had only one tiny bamboo stick with us for “protection” and the jeep was quite a distance away. No, we weren’t scared. Staggered? Yes. Apprehensive? Yes. Wanting to run away as far as possible? Yes. But not scared. Because we were stupid knew that lionesses didn’t attack for no reason. And they had no reason to attack us other than having being startled by us and interrupted during what was probably a hunt. And since this was a grazing ground, we were safe. Mostly. I think I told myself that to stop from turning into pile of scared mush.
In those minutes, I took back all that I had thought about lions earlier that day. EVERY.SINGLE.THING.
It doesn’t matter how many times you go stare at an animal in a zoo…they cannot be compared to those same animals in the wild. It’s painfully obvious that in that moment, the one who decides what happens isn’t the human, mostly because the majority of humans are to busy having “accidents” in situations like these. Thankfully, the lionesses weren’t too hungry and moved away slowly, looking back over their shoulders at us every few seconds, and we went back to our jeep after they had disappeared.
The other three lionesses had probably walked away as well, because we didn’t see them. At that moment, we didn’t want to. But I did get another thing to brag about at school, so I wasn’t complaining. I mean, I almost got eaten by a lioness and then a few days later almost got blown up to bits. It was pretty cool.
humorworks 