We came across them in the early dark, 500 buffalo slouching across the Sabi Sands. The ranger cut the engine and the lights and we sat in silence, our hands cupped around our ears like giant antennae.

Some people call them a “gang” or, more poetically, “an obstinacy of buffalo”; but for me, as they whorled around us — grunting, snorting, chewing and farting their way into total darkness — it began to feel more like “a revelation of buffalo”. Not the “black death” of which hunters speak, but a benign bovine intelligence … to whom we seemed so incidental, I half wanted to give them a friendly smack on the bum just to help them on their way...