A much better read than The Serengeti Lion, this book details what the field work was like on a personal level. Schaller describes the difficulties he encountered, from getting vehicles stuck in ruts, to loosing track of animals (radio-tracking was in its infancy). One chapter is about how his family handled living in the bush and their various wild pets (at different times, a warthog, mongoose and lion cub). There’s a chapter about dealing with poachers and examining the significance of that problem, listing man right up there alongside the prominent predators. I enjoyed greatly the chapters on wild hunting dogs, cheetah and leopards, but of course it is mostly about lion prides. It has all the same information as The Serengeti Lion (some of the sentences repeated word-for-word) but with far fewer statistics and more inclusion of personal descriptions and interesting incidents. Especially Schaller’s own feelings and perceptions about the work, the animals’ individualities, and the landscape around him. It’s very palpable through his words how much the author loved the land and admired the animals he studied. Very interesting is a final chapter where he and a companion roamed the landscape to see how many opportunities they would have of scavenging food or finding weak prey they could easily tackle- once he laid hands on a sick zebra foal, another on a blind giraffe calf- in order to estimate how well primitive hominids could have lived in the area. I don’t know how well his assumptions stand up to
modern anthropology, though... I highly recommend this book over the prior one. It’s just the kind of work a casual reader like myself can appreciate, enjoy and learn from.

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