Unbroken

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

Lions are strong and powerful, but sometimes even they have bad moments. This male was limping. Something had injured one of his feet and he was struggling to walk with it. I watched him coming toward the vehicle, one foot hard to put down, and he kept coming anyway. Wounded but still moving forward.

I wanted the full body for this one. Most of my lion work is tight on the face, but this was not a face story. This was a body story. The full frame tells you what you need to know — the lean muscle, the scars, the injured foot, and still the head held up and the eyes forward. I worked from a low angle in the vehicle with a wide lens so he would fill the frame with the whole of him and none of it would be hidden.

This is not a photograph about a lion. It is a photograph about what you do when you cannot do what you normally do. He kept walking. Slowly, painfully, but forward. That is all any of us can do in the bad moments — the ones where the work is harder than we want it to be, where the body is not cooperating, where something has gone wrong and there is no quick way out. You move forward. You do not wait to feel better before you move.

This image belongs to The Heart of the Wild. I do not photograph wildlife to document it. I photograph it because the natural world shows us things about ourselves if we watch closely enough. Sometimes the lesson is in a mother carrying her cub. Sometimes it is in four young cheetahs playing at the base of a tree. And sometimes it is in a wounded lion who will not stop walking.