On my third day in the bush, camp manager Sean Triestch radios Morundu that he's come across fresh lion tracks while out jogging. As I contemplate a "wilderness" with radio communications and jogging routes, Morundu drives us over to examine the male lion footprints laid on top of last night's elephant footpads and under this morning's pair of sneakers. He cautiously gets out of the vehicle to scan the ground. Suddenly, a huge beer-colored form leaps out from under a bush willow. For a few alarming, tantalizing seconds, I glimpse the blond-maned lion, which runs from us, stops to look over its shoulder, and then casually urinates against a red star apple bush. "That's Castle marking his territory," Morundu says with a smile. "He's leaving an "I was here' message for his brother, Black Label."

Castle dissolves into the brush; my sighting of Africa's iconic animal has lasted less than a minute. Morundu, who recognizes him by his scarred nose and a black spot on the mane beneath his chest, tells me how this lion's family has coped with a series of natural disasters. For several years, the pride was regularly observed hunting adult hippos, waiting for one to emerge onto solid ground to graze, surrounding it, and biting the rear leg tendons to prevent its escape. Then in July 2000, fire swept the area, reducing the reed beds to ash and burning the lionesses' foot pads, leaving them unable to hunt for three weeks, during which time their cubs all starved to death. In 2002, the pride's two elderly matriarchs died, and in 2003 the sires of that year's litter abandoned their cubs to follow a stray herd of domestic cattle—easy pickings—into neighboring Namibia.

As a youngster, Castle might have enjoyed hippo feasts, but now he and his remaining siblings and cousins, both male and female, are solitary hunters of small prey such as warthogs. "We can tell the lions are related because they don't fight when they cross paths, but they no longer kill hippos or even cooperate," Morundu says. "It's as if they've lost their knowledge and the tribe has fallen apart."

Vumbura Plains Camp, twenty minutes by light aircraft to the west, consists of fourteen thatched lofts linked by wooden walkways near the junction of the Okavango River and its two main tributaries. In addition to Land Cruiser drives, guests have the option of taking motorboat cruises on papyrus-banked rivers or mokoro trips across hippo lagoons. Dux Motakatshipi, a strapping guide with a Barry White baritone, is a bit surprised at my needle-in-a-haystack request to search for lions in the tall grass. It transpires that this camp, too, has a resident pride that suffered trauma. Four months before my arrival, two intruders chased out the dominant male, Big Red, who had grown too old and weak to hold on to his territory. Rejecting the newcomers' attempts to woo her, Big Red's partner has refused to mate with them and remains near the camp, trying to hold her ground while protecting her two sub-adult offspring, a female and a male, who has begun to sprout his father's signature reddish mane.