ANGETENAR (MSMV REMIX)

Then there’s Dimples, Tabby’s great friend, who has a black mark like a dimple on one cheek. The other two lionesses are Greta and Lona (both names inspired by Greta Garbo, who always wanted to be alone). They don’t appear to be an integral part of the pride, and they’re both very wary.
And that was the Machaton pride as we came to know it in the early months of 1975.
In May, I saw Tabby flirting with Agamemnon. A few weeks later, on June 6, 1975, I was out in the bush again, bumping along in a closed Wagoneer (another jeep-type vehicle) with Joe Zamboni, our friend the California dentist who happened to be staying with us. We saw something dart across the road a long way ahead. Thinking it might be a lion, Joe and I hopped out. We had just started to look for spoor when we heard the unmistakable mutterings of lions in the bush nearby. So in we went - I with my Westley-Richards .404, Joe with his camera right behind. But there was no sign of the lions. Suddenly we heard a peculiar growling noise - a noise I’d never heard before in all the hours I’d spent listening to lions. We walked very quietly towards it. Then we saw a big lion 0 it was Agamemnon, standing in a low combretum bush. He was a long way off, and looking the other way, so we crept back to fetch the Wagoneer.
We returned to the spot in the vehicle, and there was the lion standing over a wildebeest kill. There wasn’t much of the carcass left. Agamemnon had fed, and fed handsomely. Then a lioness came out of the bush - Tabby again. She walked straight up to Agamemnon and he started to trail her, nose to rear. Tabby kept flicking her tail. She was probably not much more than a teenager; she could easily have been his daughter or grand-daughter.
Eventually she lay down on her paws and he mounted her, growling the way a lion growls at mating, and biting the nape of her neck very softly. During the next two and a half hours, they repeated the mating ritual ten times and the sequence of the actions was the same. We watched them spellbound until it was too dark to see, or photograph, any more.