SEVEN WORLDS OF WONDER

Robyn Foyster embarks on her first safari, taking in the raw beauty of South Africa's Kwazulu-Natal game reserve, and is moved by both the fragility and strength of this untamed part of the planet.

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Footprints in the sand share the secrets of this untamed world in Kwazulu-Natal’s best private game reserve. This is the first lesson I learn on safari as we head off at dawn in a nine-seater open vehicle in search of recent paw print sightings of the world’s biggest and fastest cat.

Less than 20 minutes in, our tracker, Mr T, raises his arm to halt the vehicle. On the dirt road in front of us is a wide eyed baby cheetah, no more than six weeks old. Our vehicle stops and my heart stops with it. With no mother in sight, the tawny-coloured cheetah cub stares right at us. Left to fend for itself while the mother hunts for food, the cub continuously chirps like a bird, a high pitched calling for the mother the cub so desperately longs to see. Then, searching for safety, the cub retreats into the bush.

Fearful about the cub’s fate, we wait a few moments in hope the mother will find her cub before edging slowly into the thicket, but as we do, Mr T points ominously to fresh leopard prints, the first sign that a dangerous predator has been lurking nearby. Suddenly, the cheetah mother emerges, and is standing directly ahead of us though camouflaged by the trees. With her head held high, ears back and looking alert, she furiously calls to her young in the same high-pitched bird sound. But now there's only a deafening silence from the cub we'd watched so intently only moments before.

No gruesome mauling was seen but the cub's fate was written in the sand, and this was the last sighting of the baby animal and those delicate paws, serving as a heart-wrenching reminder of the fragility of life on our planet, particularly for those species like the cheetah which are so perilously close to extinction in the wild.