I woke at two in the morning, bladder bursting, and strained to hear sounds of critters over the snores of my seven-year-old daughter. Nothing. Relieved, I unzipped the tent and cautiously scanned the African night with my headlamp before peeing. No elephants. No cape buffalo. No hyenas. And most importantly: no lions.
Mere moments after my family had climbed into the rooftop tent above our rented 4×4 earlier that evening, we’d heard a menacing rumble. It turned my stomach to liquid.
“What was that?” asked Talon, our eleven-year-old son.
“Sounded like a motorcycle,” my husband Rob answered. I assumed he was half-truthing so the kids wouldn’t freak out. Because every cell in my body knew without a doubt that it was a lion—and it was close.
We were alone in Lolldaiga Hills Conservancy, a forty-nine-thousand-acre wildlife reserve in northern Kenya, on the tail end of a DIY safari. There was no lodge for miles. No guide or guard in sight. And definitely no
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