Most of these lions live inside protected national parks and wildlife reserves, and yet these supposedly viable populations face serious dangers, ranging from inbreeding and disease to the lack of financing and political instability that can cripple or corrupt park management. Up to seventy-eight percent of the lions in the southern sector of South Africa's Kruger National Park are infected with bovine tuberculosis. In Somalia, the newly elected government has no funds even to staff Kismayu and Hargeysa national parks. According to Osman Gedow Amir, a Somali biodiversity expert, poachers armed with AK-47s are killing female lions in southern Somalia and using bush airstrips to ship cubs to private menageries in the sheikhdoms of the Arab Gulf.

Outside the parks, lions are being decimated in ever greater numbers by local people preempting or taking revenge on livestock killers and man-eaters. The situation is particularly ominous in Kenya. In the past five years, the availability of the cheap pesticide Furadan has led Masai and Samburu pastoralists to forgo building bomas (lion-proof cattle shelters) in favor of a few cents' worth of Furadan-poisoned meat, which eliminates not just one cattle-killing culprit but collaterally entire lion families.

"We in the West don't put up with predators, and in a way, Africans are just catching up with us," says Laurence Frank, a University of California at Berkeley biologist studying human-lion conflict on Kenya's Laikipia Plateau, where lions following seasonal migrations of hoofed game often stray into cattle grazing areas. Frank has convinced a few white ranchers to open private safari lodges, whose tourist fees more than make up for lions' livestock predations. He is also reluctantly advocating the reintroduction of trophy hunting—banned in Kenya since the 1970s—as an enticement for the Masai and Samburu to view lions as an important source of income rather than unwanted vermin, since in other countries a full-maned male lion can fetch tens of thousands of dollars from a hunter wishing to shoot it.

In northern Botswana, lion life is influenced by the annual cycle of the Okavango River, which rises in Angola during the rainy season, starting in November, and overflows into a delta of permanent and temporary channels six months later, in the dry season. From a light plane skipping under the January rain clouds, the landscape looks like a giraffe hide of expanding or shrinking grass pans and lagoons; on the ground, each mini-environment has a shifting predator-prey dynamic, and prides living just miles apart may exhibit startlingly different behavior.

A thirty-year-old former truck driver who didn't see a wild lion until he joined the safari industry, Morundu tells me that fourteen lions roam the vicinity of Zibalianja Camp. There are several big males, which camp staff have affectionately named after African beers—Carling, Hansa, Windhoek—but "they have been acting strange," Morundu says.