Reporting Date: 6th October 2011.
 

The Gnu that ran back.

Ranger Jaffery and Gordon  were out on a game drive by the banks of the mara river with their  guests waiting  to see if a large group of wildebeests  would  cross.  It was about mid-day and the strong heat of the day  was  pushing these animals to keep piling at the edge of the river noisily. As usual, when it comes to river crossing, patience is the price to pay, so they  waited for almost half an hour before the action started. These animals crossed for almost twenty minutes in a wild rush and  then walked in a long line in the open plains before spreading out.  After a while the crossing stopped and one small group remained behind on one side of the river. There was no sign of crocodiles where they were crossing  and  everybody thought they had escaped death. But one young  wildebeests  that had crossed into the open plains decided to run back and plunged himself into the river to catch up with the ones that had remained on the  other bank. It was as if he had lost his mother and went searching for her. He never made it across as from  somewhere  in the middle of the  river  emerged a crocodile which grabbed him by the hind legs, pulled and drowned him.  All the way from a safe zone in the grassland, he had brought himself  into the jaws of a crocodile that had perfectly hide on the crossing point. 

NB: * = Same animals seen by different rangers