Although the shot hippo has not been dead for more than a day, an unbearable heat means it already smells foul. It doesn’t help that the trackers put out a barrel with a soup of stomach contents and blood in the heat after yesterday’s hunt; a soup that is now scattered in front of us on the lake shore. But the unappetising slop strikes the crocodile’s various senses as a hammer of pleasure right between the eyes. For the nearby crocodiles, the next few hours are about getting as much of the laid-out hippo bait as possible.
The Tonga tribe live side by side with the crocodiles on the Zimbabwean side of Lake Kariba.