A leopard's urine smells like buttered popcorn. It does? "Yes Ma'am," KG assures me in his southern drawl. He also does a great Cockney, cut glass Chelsea, US chat show host, and Chinese accent. Three parts Cuba Gooding Jnr, two parts Forest Whitaker, and equal measures serious ecologist and animal behaviourist, Katlego "KG" Maduse, senior ranger at Sabi Sabi's Selati Camp is a riot.
It's late afternoon and we're peering into the branches of a large acacia where a male leopard stretches out, eyes closed, sweetly dreaming. On the bough above, his glamour puss girlfriend snoozes fitfully, using her fresh kill as a pillow. Their legs and tail dangle over the branches, the rosettes of their hooker-chic coats rippling with the rise and fall of their replete bellies.
Three hyenas circle the tree peering up periodically in the hopes of a meaty morsel falling their way.
"Hyenas give new meaning to window shopping," says KG.
Opportunistic feeders, they'll eat almost anything. Like some humans I know.
To enable them to hoist their ready meals into their arboreal pantries, leopards may first disembowel their kill, removing offal to lighten the load, explains KG.
Being solitary hunters, they avoid fighting. He segues into mafia mode. "But animals don't read da rulebooks, Tony."
Glamour Puss has a full bladder but even if the male does appear to be asleep, she's loath to take a bathroom break. She snarls a warning just in case he's planning to muscle in on her trophy but Leopardo Di Caprio doesn't bat an eyelid.
Glamour Puss isn't convinced, but what's a girl to do? She begins piddling from the branch, a comical expression of relief playing across her feline features, as the hyenas skip nimbly out the way.
"Mmmmmm, smells just like the movies," quips KG.
"I can't smell anything," I respond, and KG helpfully edges the Landy closer, all the better to sniff the urine. I have a sudden inkling of how a Peeping Tom skulking in a ladies lavatory must feel - dry mouth, thumping heart - so many what ifs Hang on, I do smell something. Could it be popcorn?
Actually, it's fear. In one fluid movement the male has leapt onto the female's branch and grabbed her kill. Never underestimate a sleeping cat. The hyenas surge forward as the leopards tussle with the carcass but the male snatches it from her and forcibly hoists his ill-gotten gain a few branches higher, carefully hooking the horns into a fork to balance his meal.
Like a broken marionette, the hapless impala's limbs jerk about in a macabre dance every time he rips off a hunk of flesh.
The furious female bounds down the tree and stalks into the bush, her evening ruined. Now and then slivers of meat and bone tumble into expectant hyena jaws.
In the bush, one creature's loss is another's gain.
Later, after dining even more sumptuously than the leopards, my husband and I repair to Selati's Ivory Suite where antique furniture, Persian rugs, and sepia shots of James Stevenson-Hamilton and Harry Wolhuter, early Kruger rangers, conjure up the late 1800s - with all the 21st century trimmings.
Our bathroom is a cross between a hammam and a chapel; the bathtub nearly as big as our plunge pool.
Burrowing into the warmth of our king-sized bed, I spare a thought for the bush bashers of yesteryear - Harry Wolhuter, who fought off two lions with just a knife, and the ordinary folk using the old Selati Railway Line.
One evening, close to where Selati Camp is today, waiting passengers had to climb trees to evade a pride of hungry lions. The driver peered into the darkness but seeing nobody, steamed on towards Komatipoort. Eventually railway management provided ladders and train drivers were instructed to look for passengers in the branches.
Some night that must have been, I reflect, lulled to sleep by the distant rumble of lions.
In the soft grey light before sunrise, I hear hyenas celebrating the night's hunt.
It is a harmony joyous as a tabernacle choir on laughing gas.
Hysterical giggles announce: "A scrub hare for me!" Hee! Hee! Yippeeee! An answering high-pitched chortle lays claim to a guinea fowl or rainbow skink.
I hope the hyenas laughing loudest are boasting about their venison that fell from a tree. Maybe ...
The day dawns full of expectation, wild sage, aniseed and lavender scenting the air, as we head out on our morning drive.
First up is a crash of four rhino - a young male, two females and a youngster. As we watch, the young male tries to mate with the female but she shrugs him off.
He retreats, lowering his head to the ground in a classic rhino sulk, even though he's barely old enough to start a midden. The female wants a dominant male who can offer her good grazing territory and water, the rhino equivalent of a big house and pool, explains KG.
Beta males are tolerated so long as they don't kick their dung about or flirt with the girls.
Still relentlessly poached for their horn, used in dubious remedies and the manufacturing of dagger handles in Yemen, more than 100 rhino were slaughtered in Kruger Park alone last year.
"Some prize the horn as an aphrodisiac because the male mounts the female for 45 minutes at a time," explains KG.
He adopts an excitable Chinese accent. "We, ah, want to make love like lino. Take, ah, long, long time."
Ironically, they may as well drink pureed toenail parings.
So game-rich is the Sabi Sands that we saw at least three of the Big Five on every game drive, finding ourselves in the thick of grazing buffalo one minute and a herd of elephants the next, thanks to the skills of our tracker, Zeb Hlatswayo.
The pachyderms browsed so close we could feel the air every time they gently flapped their ears.
KG always ensured we had a quick escape route. "Mock charge? Doesn't exist," he said. "There's just a warning, then the real thing."
At least 50 000 muscles in an elephant's trunk enables it to pick a flower or, as I saw in Thailand, paint intricate portraits.
Further on we happen on a pride of 16 lions, so close I could have reached out a hand and fondled their ears. I did not reach out a hand. Body parts are best kept to oneself in Sabi Sabi territory.
A guided walk with KG is to be highly recommended, however. You stop being an observer seeing everything through a camera lens and take your place as a part of it all. It's a more intimate encounter with the bush, a rolling panorama of sensory revelations.
Did I mention KG's preoccupation with dung in general and hyena poo in particular?
To be fair, I never met a ranger who didn't share his obsession.
Even David Livingston and other missionary do-gooders used white petrified hyena turds as chalk. And tortoises eat the dung to strengthen their shells, thanks to its high calcium content.
"The only thing a hyena can't digest is hair, " says KG, pulling some apart to show us the tufts inside.
A journey of five giraffe amble over undulating grasslands dotted with thorny acacias to drink from the watering hole.
"Gee Raff," says KG in his American crawl. "The world's tallest animal. Like cowboys walking into the sunset, they look as though they're on a perpetual journey, hence the collective noun.
"Lions won't pounce on a giraffe since it can kick like a horse, but will rather chase it onto uneven territory, hoping it loses its balance and falls, thanks to its slightly shorter hind legs.
"A giraffe gives birth standing up. The two metre drop starts the baby's heart and lungs, and snaps the umbilical cord as giraffe don't have scissors," explains KG. "Like a failed bungee jump."
We also saw the giraffe licking an vertebra bone for the calcium, a process KG called osteophasia.
We saw zebra, dressed in their black and white full-body fingerprints, impala, kudu, waterbuck, warthog, chameleons and even, to our delight, a genet leaping off a branch. I adore genets.
Living near Delta Park, we have a resident genet that periodically helps itself to one of our chickens.
I admire its ability to survive in an urban area but the last time it bit off the head of a hen, my domestic helper, the sharp-tongued Becky Lelaka, said: "Eish! That one thinks she is Genet Jackson!"
When we weren't out spotting game, we had lunch and a heavenly spa treatment at Earth Lodge. Internationally acknowledged as the most environmentally sensitive lodge in Africa. Its elephant dung look-alike walls sculpted into the earth make you feel as though you're inside a termite mound, albeit one with driftwood sculptures and a magnificent view.
Threatened by the predatory recession, some travellers may retreat to their burrows this winter.
The more adventurous will see this as an opportunity to bag some of the best safaris going. And, believe me, the Selati Camp is seriously hard to beat.