Tiger vs. Wildebeest

Don't give in to casual habits or tics: This isn't the time or place for a twitch of the whisker or flick of the tail.

Be statue-still and stay focused for the next half hour, as if your life depended on it — like Julie's does.

Can you who rest on your haunches at the top of the food chain do it for even 10 minutes? Five? For as long as it takes you to read this story and peruse the slide show? Breathless patience and stealth: These are only two of the countless requirements of being a successful predator in the wild.

Crouched in the knee-high brown grass so low that John Varty can barely pick her out even though he knows right where she is, the captive-born Julie is demonstrating her "wild" skills like the 4-year-old pro she is, having been taught all aspects of the hunt, time and again, during hundreds of outings much like this one.

The hunt unofficially started around 7:45 a.m., with Julie elevating herself to a high point by perching on the roof of the Land Rover. She spent long minutes basking in the sun, languidly fluffing her ruff.

A mature cat who exudes dignity and demands respect, Julie is not above kitten-like antics. Yesterday, she managed to wedge her head between the vehicle's aerial and its shattered windshield. This morning, she rolled onto her back with legs in the air and promptly lost her balance, falling from the dented roof onto the dented hood with a great thud.

From, "I meant to do that," her look changes to, "RED ALERT." She juts her chin forward and surveys the landscape with tight, snappy movements, detecting and assessing a herd of five wildebeest in the distance.

They are grazing out in the open — hardly prime targets for a solitary cat. Big brother Ron is around, somewhere. If Julie could enlist his help in herding them toward her, they'd have a fighting chance, perhaps. Tigers, unlike lions, aren't communal hunters by nature. They move secretly under the cover of forests and scrub. The upside of being a tiger is you don't have to share the spoils. The downside is that when you dine alone, you're responsible for it all, from soup to nuts — from strategizing and stalking to swiping and inflicting the suffocation bite.

Tigers are different from lions, socially-speaking, despite that the two are remarkably similar creatures underneath their coats. Lion researchers working in East Africa believe the key to group-living for lions is being able to defend large kills from others in the wide open spaces of the Serengeti plains. It makes sense to share a zebra with close relatives rather than lose it to strangers.

In their native Asia, tigers hunt alone. But will Ron and Julie adapt to their African habitat — a considerable chunk of which is grassland — by cooperating together? Or will they hunt alone in the forests and ravines here, habitat similar to that of Asia? John Varty is eager to find out.

It's been a while since either tiger has had a successful hunt. Ron killed a warthog about 10 days ago and Julie, a bushbuck about a week ago. Tigers are gorge-feeders. Post-kill, they stuff themselves so full of meat that it's no hardship to go without for a few days, or even a week. But this morning, Julie's making whining sounds, clearly hungry. Ron appears less bothered by the empty stomach.

At 8 a.m., Julie jumps off the Land Rover and creeps to the crest of a hill.

"She's working it out," Varty whispers. "You can see she's working out what to do."

He urges Ron to join his sister: "Let's go! You guys are goofing around!" Like a cheeky child, Ron hops up into the cab of a pickup to investigate a movie camera perched on a tripod that appeared sturdy until just now.

"NO RON NO!" Varty commands, tapping Ron's shoulder with a thin white baton. The discipline stick gets Ron off the truck, but Varty's appeal to him to help Julie goes unanswered. Ron flops down in the shade of the Range Rover.

Julie, meanwhile, has tiptoed into the cover of some brush at the top of the hill and begun taking the long way around to the wildebeest herd.

By 8:15, she has managed to position herself, somehow, just 20 yards in front of the wildebeest. It's as if she's melted into the rocky terrain. Her stripes serve her well, breaking up the outline of her body. Even her pointed ears are unseen.

"She's using all she's learned, calling on all her experience," Varty says. "In the open like this, they've got to have all the strings to their bow."

In my marveling at her skill, I've missed Ron's exit from the refuge of the film truck. He's gone. Somewhere.

At 8:27 a.m., Julie remains concealed, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. It's vital now, Varty says, that she carefully select her prey. The smallest, most vulnerable wildebeest is positioned furthest from her. The biggest wildebeest is closest, but perhaps Julie is surmising that he's too big and too cocky. She no doubt remembers tussling with formidable wildebeest in the past. Varty knows of three that succeeded in knocking her down, and one that horned her in the shoulder, painfully bruising it.

"Tigers are smart," Varty says, launching into a story that attests to Ron's impressive powers of memory. Ron was hunting a warthog a month ago that he missed catching just as the warthog slipped down its hole. Three weeks later, Ron encountered the warthog again. Instead of giving chase, however, Ron ran flat out directly to the warthog's hole, cutting off a good bit of distance in the process and arriving to greet his prey with a lethal bite to the throat. That was his last decent meal, unless you count that he stole half of Julie's bushbuck last week.

8:35 a.m.: Julie makes her move. She races straight at the herd. She seems to have picked the young wildebeest. But Ron suddenly appears to her right, rushing at the now separated animals. There is a flurry of hooves and dust and swishing black tails.

8:36 a.m.: The wildebeest herd is together again, intact, grazing, and boldly staring at Julie, who's out in the open now, no doubt wondering what went wrong. Varty offers a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking: It was close, but Ron and Julie made crucial errors in timing and in judging the wildebeests' paths of flight.

"The wildebeests are clever," he concedes, adding that these five may have won the battle, but ultimately, as prey species, will lose the war. "Every time the prey gets a new technique, the predator counters."

Julie looks not only hungry, but also exhausted. This hunting business is a lot less straightforward than I thought it'd be. It's complex stuff fraught with danger out here in the bush. Even for the top predator.

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