The yawn is the most active thing in the afternoon, and the afternoon has already been long. He sits in the dry grass with the mane heavy at his shoulders and the flies at his face, jaw wide, the lower fangs visible for one frame and gone. The day will not need to be more dramatic than this.
A second look. The same head, further back, the body in the frame now, the mane behind it like a piece of furniture. The picture changes the magnification and does not change the lion.
A second portrait — the same face, looser.
The same face, opposite-handed.
He turns. The composition turns with him. The mane that was on the far side is on the near side now; the rest of the afternoon has not changed at all.
The second male enters the frame. The picture pulls back just enough to let the contact register — the second cat's chin laid lightly against the first's flank, eyes part-open, the kind of small physical agreement two adult lions only make when they have shared the same shade for most of an adulthood. The frame holds it without insisting on it; a beat later it is gone.
The brother named.
“The only thing they have done all afternoon is be two.
”
The other brother — eyes wide, head up.
A close on the younger of the two — head turned, eyes wide open, the older male a soft sleeping mass behind. The contact has already been pretended away; only one of them is keeping watch, and only barely.
The wider lens, finally. One of the brothers lying long under his bush, head up, tongue just out — the most active frame on this camera, and even here he is not bothering to stand. Out of frame, the plain is busy: a wildebeest line on the horizon, two zebras at a termite mound, warthogs crossing the track. All of it stays outside these pictures.
The wider lens — a male lying along the base of a bush.
Both brothers, flat — the afternoon's last frame.
Both of them, finally, flat. Lying side by side in pale grass, eyes shut, the mane of the further one a single dark line above the other's body. The afternoon has decided what the afternoon was about, and the brothers — being only ever two of each other — have agreed.
Late-afternoon warmth, dry grass, the dust-smell of bodies that have not moved in a long while. Two cameras on one pair — one close on faces and flies, one wide enough to hold the plain the brothers are pointedly not part of.
- Camera
- Canon EOS R5 Mark II · Canon EOS R6
- Lens
- Sigma 500mm f/4 DG OS HSM Sports · Canon RF 70–200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z
