On safari at Samara game reserve in South Africa’s Great Karoo

GRAAFF-REINET, South Africa — “All right, this is where we get out and walk,” said Charl Pretorius, our ranger, as he jumped from the safari vehicle and began to scan the horizon. I turned to my friend: “He’s kidding, right?” But Charl was very serious. He’d gone into that tracking-mode trance that had become so familiar over the last few days, and he was onto something. Sure enough, within a few minutes Charl had found her. Not more than 15 feet away, under the shade of a shepherd’s tree, lay a cheetah. A real-life, wild — and very much uncaged — cheetah. It occurred to me that I was probably the slowest runner there. “There’s nothing to fear,” said Charl. Though Sibella, as the cheetah is named, is wild, she tolerates human attention and would go off into the bush when she grew bored with our company.