This was not an easy thing to watch. It took so long, but we stayed till the end... almost as a mark of respect to the fact of it all. The waterhole was shrunken and not very deep, yet still it harboured a smallish crocodile of two, maybe a bit more, metres. We had seen the croc a few days earlier and so, knowing of its presence we wended that way at first light. The croc had grabbed a nyala ewe that came down to drink as we entered the hide. The croc had a proper grip on a rear leg and had pulled her right into the belly of the pool but was simply not big enough, or the water deep enough, to drag her under. And so an epic tug of war commenced, first trending one way, and then the other. Once or twice the ewe almost made it to dry ground, but always as she attained the shallower water, the croc got enough purchase to anchor. Every time the croc surfaced to breath, it would have to give up its purchase on the bottom and the nyala seemed as if she might escape. But as soon a the croc submerged the balance shifted and she couldnt budge. Again and again the croc came up to breath... and then hunkered back down. The outcome was inevitable. Eventually, after around 6 hours she could fight no more. She dropped her head into the water and breathed a last trail of bubbles and her eye went blank. At Mpafa waterhole, iMFOLOSI, June 2012. CAMERA; D3 LWNS; NIKKOR 200~400 F4 VRII (c) wolf avni 2012. — at iMfolozi Game Reserve.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 11:40:23 +0000
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