Sarah Harding swung the glasses through the darkness, looking ahead of the pack. She saw the prey: a herd of African buffalo, standing belly-deep in the grass, agitated. They were bellowing and stamping their feet.
The hyenas yelped louder, a pattern of sound that would confuse the prey. They rushed through the herd, trying to break it up, trying to separate the calves from their mothers. African buffalo looked dull and stupid, but in fact they were among the most dangerous large African mammals, heavy powerful creatures with sharp horns and notoriously mean dispositions. The hyenas could not hope to bring down an adult, unless it was injured or sick.
But they would try to take a calf
Sitting behind the wheel of the Jeep, Makena, her assistant, said, “You want to move closer?”
“No, this is fine.”
In fact, it was more than fine. Their jeep was on a slight rise and they had a better-than-average view. With any luck, she would record the entire attack pattern. She turned on the video camera, mounted on a tripod five feet above her head, and dictated rapidly into the tape recorder.
“Fl south, F2 and F5 flanking, twenty yards. F3 center. F6 circling wide cast. Can’t see F7. F8 circling north. Fl straight through. Disrupting. Herd moving, stamping. There’s F7. Straight through. F8 angling through from the north. Coming out, circling again.”
This was classic hyena behavior. The lead animals ran through the herd, while others circled it, then came in from the sides. The buffalo couldn’t keep track of their attackers. She listened to the herd bellowing, even as the group panicked, broke its tight clustered formation. The big animals moved apart, turning, looking. Harding couldn’t see the calves; they were below the grass. But she could hear their plaintive cries.
Now the hyenas came back. The buffalo stamped their feet, lowered their big heads menacingly. The grass rippled as the hyenas circled, yelping and barking, the sounds more staccato. She caught a brief glimpse of female F8, her jaws already red. But Harding hadn’t seen the actual attack.
The buffalo herd moved a short distance to the east, where it regrouped. One female buffalo now stood apart from the herd. She bellowed continuously at the hyenas. They must have taken her calf
Harding felt frustrated. It had happened so swiftly – too swiftly – which could only mean that the hyenas had been lucky, or the calf was injured. Or perhaps very young, even newborn; a few of the buffalo were still calving. She would have to review the videotape, to try and reconstruct what had happened. The perils of studying fast-moving nocturnal animals, she thought.
But there was no question they had taken an animal. All the hyenas were clustered around a single area of grass; they yelped and jumped. She saw F3, and then F5, their muzzles bloody. Now the pups came lip, squealing to get at the kill. The adults immediately made room for them, helped them to eat. Sometimes they pulled away flesh from the carcass, and held it so the young ones could eat.
Their behavior was familiar to Sarah Harding, who had become in recent years the foremost expert on hyenas in the world. When she first reported her findings, she was greeted with disbelief and even outrage from colleagues, who disputed her results in very personal terms. She was attacked for being a woman, for being attractive, for having “an overbearing feminist perspective.” The University reminded her she was on tenure track. Colleagues shook their heads. But Harding had persisted, and slowly, over time, as more data accumulated, her view of hyenas had come to be accepted.
Still, hyenas would never be appealing creatures, she thought, watching them feed. They were ungainly, heads too big and bodies sloping, coats ragged and mottled, gait awkward, vocalizations too reminiscent of an unpleasant laugh. In an increasingly urban world of concrete skyscrapers, wild animals were romanticized, classified as noble or ignoble, heroes or villains. And in this media-driven world, hyenas were simply not photogenic enough to be admirable. Long since cast as the laughing villains of the African plain, they were hardly thought worth a systematic study until Harding had begun her own research.