Maasai Mara

Even before landing at the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, it becomes obvious that this a special place. Africa – in compelling, primal images – invites you to imagine what it means to be unfettered. All you have to do is look out the window.

The plane is small enough that in-flight service consists of the pilot turning around, extending a tub of mints, and asking: “Anybody want a candy?” Propellers, thundering near enough that you can hear if they cough, have carried you from the capital, Nairobi, over some of the world’s largest slums, above vast tea farms, past suburbs with beautiful estates, to beyond the developed world.

Now, outside the skin of the aircraft, a few thousand feet below is the burnt-orange landscape of nature shows and the “Lion King.” It’s all fantastic. But this is real.

There are traditional villages, maybe five huts, circled by fences made of thorny branches. A small river bends and stretches its way across the landscape. That’s the Mara River, and the region near it is green and fertile. Things move there, tiny dots of life completing the annual orbit that brings them here from the Serengeti.

Coming closer now, the pilot makes a very low pass above a dirt runway. This is no bravado. He’s verifying that the coast is clear; out there, young men and women with bullhorns drive trucks up and down, running animals off the landing strip, more than you ever imagined could exist.

Then he sets you down and kills the engines. You climb down the short steps of the plane and plant your feet on the ground, on wild earth, in one of the untamed places of our world.

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Wildebeests and zebras, antelope and gazelles have come here in enormous herds, maybe 2 million strong, following grasses that grow from seasonal rains. They birth their young here, and many of them die here.

Apex predators follow the herds — lions, cheetahs, leopards — and Nile crocodiles wait for them to charge across the Mara River. Hippos will fiercely defend territory and kill grazers who stray too near. Hyenas pick off the young or stragglers, or the lame.

I saw lionesses feeding on a fresh kill, pausing only a moment to look up and determine I was no threat. They went back to eating.

Then a lone wildebeest came along, and they turned their attention to the elegant, terrible task of hunting. Three lionesses fanned out in the grass, almost invisible, deadly silent, creeping toward the target.

It was quick: a sudden turn from the prey, explosive acceleration, a flash of lionesses, desperate sprinting, a short veer then a leg swipe, ending in a tumble of hunter and hunted.

The wildebeest may have been looking for a calf, drawn fatally close to her hunted young, and was now dead, too. But in this there is also life. Lion cubs came from the tall grass, escorted by their own mother or aunt, able to eat today. Tomorrow their pride may not succeed in the chase.

Even if they do, super cats don’t always win. I’ve seen a leopard trapped up a tree, waiting for lions that have taken his kill for themselves to leave. Lions lose, too. Sometimes they retreat before massive cape buffalo defending their young or are driven off a kill by a cackle of hyenas, fearless opportunists and persistent hunters.

It is a hard place. But in this circle, there is something beautiful.

Wildebeest calves prance around, almost hopping on spindly legs. Zebra foals top their distinctive stripes with a fluffy hint of brown juvenile coat. Elephants pause like great ships in a harbor as, one by one, they stop and mourn at the sun-bleached skull of a now gone family member, caressing it with their trunks.

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And then there is the land itself.

Imagine vast plains, stretching into layers of horizons, each more hazed than the one before it. Now, place a lone acacia tree into the scene, and you have something out of a travel-romance movie. But, here, it is real. It is Africa in its most fundamental state: vast, untamed, foreboding and inviting, threatening and friendly, all at once.

This is the land where giraffes amble right past you, regal and wild, with a gait like they’re under water. Where baboon infants hitch a ride on their mothers’ backs like little jockeys, where cheetahs streak across the field at 70 mph till they quickly tire and then lounge like big house cats.

This is where you can see an afternoon storm rolling in from miles away, watching rain fall in great curtains: water, then grass, then the herds will come, and the cats and crocs can step into the circle of life that is elemental Africa.

If you are open to wonder, this is a place to make you feel small, like when you were a kid looking at the night sky. Only here the stars are constellations of living things. They dare you to step outside your own skin and be part of it, open to life’s dangers and joys, vulnerable, stampeding or stalking, knowing that what is important is the moment you’re in, and the instinct that insists you listen:

Right here, right now, is all that matters.

Notice. Appreciate. Acknowledge.

Joe Center is a photographer and writer based in Houston, Texas.