Chapter One The Lens and the Glass

[ THANDI ]

The koppie.

Red rock. White lichen. A lizard the color of rust doing push-ups on a boulder four meters to her left, which Thandi knew was a territorial display and not exercise, because she had read about it in the Struik field guide on page 214, and because no animal on earth exercised on purpose except humans, and humans were, in Thandi’s experience, wrong about most things.

Her father was up there.

Somewhere above her on the granite shelf, Sipho James Molefe lay on his stomach with a Canon R5 and a 600-millimeter telephoto lens pointed at a sausage tree where a man at the Skukuza camp shop had said—hand on his chest, voice low, like he was sharing the coordinates to buried treasure—that a female leopard had been sleeping since Tuesday.

Tuesday was three days ago.

Thandi had done the math. Three days. A leopard sleeps eighteen to twenty hours a day. The sausage tree was 140 meters from the koppie’s base, which put it at the absolute outer edge of the Canon’s reach even with the 1.4x teleconverter her father had bought in Johannesburg with money her mother had said, in the kitchen, in the voice that meant the conversation was already over, could have paid for Thandi’s school shoes twice.

The leopard was not in the tree.

Thandi knew this. She had looked—not with the Canon, which weighed more than she did and smelled like the inside of her father’s camera bag, which smelled like old foam and ambition—but with her own eyes, and her own eyes were good. Better than Papa’s, actually. She’d had them tested at school. 6/4 vision. The optometrist had said remarkable and Thandi had written the word in her field journal because it had the same number of syllables as caterpillar and she liked that.

But the leopard didn’t matter.

The leopard had never mattered. The leopard was what everyone came for—every tourist in every white Land Cruiser with every rented telephoto lens, filling every memory card with the same photograph that already existed eleven million times on Instagram. Thandi had counted. Not eleven million exactly, but she had typed “Kruger leopard” into her father’s phone once and the number of results had made her feel a particular kind of tired that she did not yet have a word for.

She had words for most things.

She was working on the rest.