The New Brothers

	Two young cheetahs were missing. Where had they gone?

At sunrise we stood on the roof of our truck and looked across Tanzania’s Serengeti Plain. The morning wind was gusty and chilly, making it hard to hold the binoculars steady.

In the distance a golden-colored cat reflected the rich color of the rising sun. It looked toward us for a moment, then suddenly crouched down out of sight in the tall brown grass.

This cheetah might be “Goldie”, a shy mother that lived here. But Goldie had three big cubs, and we were used to seeing them as a group. Maybe this wasn’t Goldie after all.

There was only one way to find out. We had to get close enough to see the pattern of her spots.

	After Sapphire left her mother and brothers, she soon had new little cubs of her own. Sapphire’s home range remained about the same as her mother’s.

We drove slowly toward the cheetah’s resting place, paused about a hundred yards away, and looked through binoculars.

The cheetah was still there, peering at us from behind a clump of grass. We were close enough to study the spots on her face, chest, and legs. We compared the spot pattern with our photographs of Goldie. This cheetah was not Goldie. It was her daughter, Sapphire, one of the three cubs.

Ka and Kib
We knew that all three cubs had parted from their mother. They were nineteen months old, the right age for leaving. But there was no sign of Sapphire’s two brothers, Ka and Kib.

Months passed, and the fate of Ka and Kib remained a mystery. We saw Sapphire many times, though. One bright morning we followed her to the river, where she paused near a thicket. She looked around, as though worried about being seen, then called softly to her little cubs. Out they tumbled, eager for a drink of milk. Good for Sapphire, we thought.

But how about Ka and Kib? Unlike Sapphire, they had left the home range of their mother, Goldie. There was a big, tough male cheetah defending part of that area as his territory, and we feared he had chased the young males away. We never expected to see them again.

One day we were driving across the dry and dusty grasslands, which now seemed so empty. The large herds of wildebeest and zebras had migrated to greener pastures. A small bus full of tourists appeared, on its way from Lake Ndutu near the southeast boundary of the Serengeti National Park. The driver knew we studied cheetahs, and he waved at us to stop.

Two Older Males
“The Brothers caught a gazelle back there,” he said. The Brothers were a pair of male cheetahs—older than Ka and Kib—who had claimed the swamps around Ndutu as their territory. We decided to see for ourselves.

A few ragged vultures in a tree showed us the place. However, hyenas must have dragged off the remains of the gazelle, and there was no sign of The Brothers.

A stiff chill wind blew from the east, showering fine volcanic dust from the distant volcano Oldonyo Lengai. The sun was going down. We sat in the truck, eating beans from the can, peering in vain through the gloom. The cheetahs must have gone to sleep in the grass, we decided. We slept in the back of the truck, planning to continue looking in the morning.

At dawn we saw the two cheetahs across the lake: lovely spotted cats, patrolling with purpose along the swamp edge. They paused to squirt a bit of scent here and there and to make some deep scratch marks. They were warning all strange male cheetahs to stay out of their territory. Finally, hot and tired, they flopped down in the shade of a tree. We focused our binoculars on their spots.

	Ka and Kib left their mother's home range. They traveled miles away and started living in an entirely new home range.

New Faces
They were not The Brothers. The spots were entirely wrong. Now that we had a good look at them, we realized that these were young males, several years younger than The Brothers.

Who were they? We had files with us on more than three hundred cheetahs. Where would we start?

Lory suggested, “Look to see if they are Ka and Kib”. When those two were still cubs, we had glued photos of them to two cards in our files. We took them out. Yes, the cheetahs were Ka and Kib, twelve miles from their mother’s home range. Now they were holding the territory that used to belong to The Brothers. They had fought the older males and chased them away, we supposed.

After that, we visited The New Brothers, Ka and Kib, at Ndutu many times. Now they had a place of their own. Good for Ka and Kib!