π Sabi Sands, South Africa The Sabi Sands in the green season has a particular quality of light; dappled and shifting through the canopy, the kind that makes leopards disappear and reappear at will. Their mother had already crossed the road. These two were in no hurry. Leopard siblings stay close in the months before dispersal, and there is a particular behavior that marks these late weeks together: a pressing of bodies, a rubbing of faces, a physical insistence on proximity that looks, from the outside, exactly like what it is. Both tails curl upward. They are touching along the full length of themselves. Leopards are solitary animals. That is what the books say, and it is true, and it is coming. But first there is this.
