Autumn of his Reign

This was a last minute addition for our Kickstarter funded art book Dry Season Only. If you missed the Kickstarter but would still like to hear and see more of our adventures, I do have a small stock of books available for sale through my site here:Dry Season Only Books yay!.

A few other artists who went along also have some copies available but our collective whole is not huge and I suspect there won’t be a reprint of this book due to the prohibitive cost so what’s out there is likely it! You can experience the whole of our adventures and misadventures through a collection of art photos and silly doodles inspired by our trip. Some pretty awesome people went including vantid, foxfeather, mbala, utunu, kikivuli, manojalpa, Laura Garabedian,Ursula Vernon

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I spent most of the trip poised behind a camera lens. The time spent in the wild hinterlands of Botswana were ephemeral, each minute and moment touching me indelibly and yet..in a way incompletely. Too many sights, too many redefining moments for me, to be able to process completely in the moment itself. So, on our return from Africa I spent several days simply processing the photos I took and recounting to myself the many sights that, only after the fact, could truly inundate me and bring me to my emotional fall. I cried, I felt a reverent awe, and above all a deep longing to return and see the many things I felt I only half saw.

Time was an essential expedient in uncovering the essence of those concentrated moments. And as the weeks turned to months and the book's work was under way, I found a breadcrumb trail of concepts that encompassed much of my unconscious ruminations. This was one of the pieces (in a series of 3) that I found among the most powerful to me personally.

Seeing the lions of Savuti was not only a influential moment because of my many year fascination with the Okavango Delta and its inhabitants, but also because the reality of the place would impose a more severe truth than I anticipated. Wild animals live often brutal lives and there is no hand to stay nature of her cruelty, no voice to reign in justice, and sometimes no hope to prevail. After the initial swoon and lurch of my heart at seeing the lions of Savuti (a thing I didn't even dare to dream of seeing while visiting Botswana!), I felt a pressing melancholy. The troop we encountered consisted of youngsters and a few older females. It was unclear if this was what remained of the local pride or whether the pride had split during the lean times at the end of the rainy season, or were simply away hunting. Regardless of the circumstances, the lions were lean and though the youngsters still clung to the exuberance that comes with the territory of youth, they too looked in need of some easier times.

As we sat watching the pride beneath an eagerly hot midday sun, a young cinematographer approached us in his jeep. He had been following the local lions and, presumably, collecting footage of them. He informed us the young male lion's brother had been found dead a few days prior. He also informed us that the pride was much smaller than it had been in years prior and as such had been much harder for him to keep track of.

The local "Savuti" pride is world famous as hunters of the biggest of game, elephants and not only elephants but full grown bull elephants at that. But what we saw were weary aged lionesses and a crèche of youngsters with an uncertain future far removed from the glory heralding their fame. Beyond the immediate circumstances of this small pride was also the looming uncertainty faced by all lions of Africa. Where, at the turn of the 20th century, numbers were estimated at as many as 500,000, today lion populations in the whole of Africa are estimated at 20,000 individuals (or less). Many reasons have contributed to the ongoing sharp decline in lion populations across the African continent but unsurprisingly, chief among these reasons is man himself.

The sketch illustrates the lion with a fragile withering crown of leaves for a mane. The lion in the Autumn of his reign. Of course my outlook is not so grim, if even only because such a view is impractical and self defeating. There are, thankfully, many organizations working hard to preserve wild populations of lions (http://lionguardians.org/, http://www.lionaid.org/ to name just 2 whose strategies seem like sound investments in the future of lions.)

But even detached from the broad global implications playing a role in the future of lions as a species, when I saw these wild lions I saw the very intimate hardships a wild life poses for a lion (and male lions particularly).

The maned lion is an iconic visage that epitomizes power and dominion over the world before them. But the truth is far more sobering and less picturesque. What I saw in place of infallible courage and prestige was frailty, a life fraught with peril, and the staggering likelihood of a life short lived. So this picture, I suppose subconsciously illustrated these concepts before I grasped at any underlying intent. I hope to color it sometime if I’m afforded the boon of a free moment and am happy to say that the other two sketches done in the series are being and have also been colored by the talented Foxfeather and Laura Garabedian.