Sleeping with the lions

With about 20 years' experience as a game ranger in the African bush, Les Brett is South Africa's answer to Crocodile Dundee.

He is about as qualified as they come. He has passed all the exams (such as the one where they stick trainees in front of a charging buffalo to see how they react) and curls up in front of the campfire with a good book to read about the stools of African mammals.

For me, being a game ranger was always something of a childhood dream.

But to do it for real would take at least five years of lectures and training, tough days and nights sleeping rough in the bush and endless exams. I had ten days.

So I joined a crash course in a wilderness reserve called Timbavati, next to Kruger National Park in South Africa's north-eastern corner - with Les the senior instructor.

A reserve of flat grass and bushcovered plains, Timbavati is home to three main categories of animals: dangerous, invisible and endearing. The dangerous ones are the snakes, scorpions, spiders and other things you imagine crawling around your tent at night. The invisible ones, such as aardvarks and honey badgers, are on the list of reserve inhabitants but prefer to keep themselves to themselves. The endearing ones, such as elephants, are the animals most people visit Timbavati to see.

Seeing a fully-grown African elephant in the zoo is no preparation for seeing five tons of the real thing in the wild - and makes even a bad day in Timbavati better than a good day in the office.

We didn't have any bad days on the training course, although many did include the sort of experience that, back home, would have you waking up at night clinging to the ceiling.

We learned how to handle venomous snakes and scorpions and how to stitch a wound using termites that can bite through leather.

One day we were baiting lions and hyenas and the next we were learning how to identify some of the local birds - by their calls.

The trick, Les explained, is to put words into their mouths. The nocturnal fiery-necked nightjar, for example, has a particularly distinctive call that sounds as if it is saying: 'Good Lord, deliver us! Good Lord, deliver us!' to anyone who'll listen.

But the green-spotted dove, on the other hand, has a rather depressing call: 'My mother's dead, my father's dead, my brothers and sisters are dead, I'm so sad, sad, sad.'

The go-away bird, which looks like a rather sombre, greycoloured magpie with a spiky haircut, really does tell everyone to go away. Strangely, young go-away birds haven't quite grasped the plot and call out: 'How? how? how?' My personal favourite is the puffback shrike, a small black and white bird with crimson eyes, which makes an unforgettable sound just like a camera clicking and rewinding.

You might think that with so many spectacular birds, you'd spend most of your time looking up. But, as trainee game rangers, we were taught to spend most of our time looking down. We had to search for all the tracks, droppings and other clues dotted around Timbavati and learn how to identify and interpret these postcards-from the wild. Toilet affairs feature particularly big in the bush and Timbavati turned out to be a dung-lover's paradise.

When we hunted around a waterhole early one morning, even I could tell that the enormous pile of droppings we found had been made by a creature much, much bigger than myself.

But Les could do more than merely identify its original owner. Its size, and the fact that it occurred in just one pile, revealed that it was made by a lone bull elephant. Les picked up a handful and pulled out thick, undigested pieces of bark - evidence, he said, of a middle-aged elephant with badly worn molars. We also learned how to walk in lion country. Anyone can walk in lion country, of course, but the professionals do it without being eaten. 'If we stumble upon a lion,' explained Les, 'we'll get out of the area by moving slowly backwards. We will not run. If we run, we have a 100 per cent chance of being killed.'

With those odds ringing in our ears, Les announced that we'd be spending the next night sleeping rough in a dried-up riverbed. We set up camp next to an incredibly noisy roost of chacma baboons. I say 'camp' but that's an exaggeration. We had gone back to basics, with no tents, no mats, no mosquito nets - just us, a roaring campfire and enough food for 24 hours.

THE baboons quietened down soon after dark and, when their chattering and squabbling had been replaced by the evocative calling of a scops owl perched in a nearby tree, Les worked out a roster for keeping watch. He told us to wake him 'only if a lion is about to jump on everybody' and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

The rest of us didn't sleep a wink. There were lions roaring around us all night. We were no longer tourists, we had become one of the attractions - and every time a twig snapped, we spun around expecting an attack.

An attack never came, of course, and there were no casualties during the night. But the stress took its toll and, by sunrise, we trainee game rangers looked as if we had just spent 24 hours in a labour ward. Les awoke looking fully refreshed. The baboons awoke fully refreshed, too, and resumed their chattering. As we stumbled around the campsite discussing how to cook breakfast on the open fire, a little troop of them crossed in front of us.

There were nearly 20 and among them was a baby no bigger than my fist, with bright pink sticking-out ears and a puzzled look on its face. Riding like a jockey on its mother's back, and leaning against her upright tail, it was about to start another day of its own baboon-style training course: survival in the African bush.

? Mark Carwardine presents Nature and other wildlife programmes on Radio 4 and is the author of more than 40 wildlife books.

Getting there

Discovery Initiatives (01285 643333) offers an 11-day 'Secrets of a Game Ranger Safari' from £1,625. This includes return flights from Heathrow, transfers and transportation, all meals and accommodation and excursions with Les Brett. There is a £50 supplement from Manchester and Glasgow.