First light on the pride and they're already awake — a sub-adult male sitting upright in the grass, watching the vehicle with the flat, unhurried attention that lions give things that aren't food. No mane to speak of yet, but enough to place him: the fuller-maned of two brothers we'd find again before the morning was out.
The roar came later, and closer than expected — a full-chested call that you feel through the floor of the vehicle before you hear it, aimed at nothing in particular except the fact of being a lion in the Okavango at sunrise. This is the frame I keep coming back to. Extreme crop, full frame of jaw and mane, every technical thing about the shot working in the same direction as the moment itself.
By mid-morning the performance was over. We found the dominant male a few hundred metres on, settled onto a kill from the night before, chin down, in no hurry to do anything else. Waking, feeding, resting — the whole arc of a pride's morning in about ninety minutes, which is either very little time or exactly the right amount, depending on how you're inclined to think about lions.
