The Endless Plain

Polly came in from the east just after dawn, flying out of the night and into a land that did not seem to end. The Maasai people call it Siringet, the place where the land runs on forever, and from the air the name felt exact. Golden grass rolled to every horizon. Her red head and bright green body caught the first light, and her small round black-rim glasses reflected a plain the size of a small country.

The Serengeti is grass before it is anything else. Long ago, volcanoes in the highlands to the east covered these plains with ash. The ash became a thin, rich soil, and the soil grows grass packed with minerals. That is the secret hiding under the whole story. More than a million wildebeest, and hundreds of thousands of zebras and gazelles, walk enormous circles around the Serengeti every year of their lives, following that grass.

Here and there, islands of grey granite rise out of the plain. They are called kopjes, and some of their rock is among the oldest in Africa. Polly landed on the highest stone of one and understood immediately why lions love them. The rock was warm from the sun, and from the top she could see everything that moved for kilometres. Below her, in a shaded crack, a lioness was sleeping exactly like a house cat.

She kept a respectful distance until evening. As the light turned orange, dark lines appeared on the horizon, thousands of animals moving slowly north like a grey river. Polly found a flat-topped acacia tree, tucked her beak under her wing, and listened to the plain breathe. Tomorrow she would go and meet the river.