Cattle thief’s evening nap

During one of our afternoon excursions in the Yala park, we stumbled upon this huge leopard known to safari drivers as “Harak Hora”, the cattle thief. The leopard tried to creep inside a culvert but changed his mind and went in to the jungle.

The same evening, when we were returning to our park bungalow, we saw Harak Hora having his evening nap on top of a sunny rock boulder. We waited impatiently until he woke up but it took a great deal of time for him even to look at our direction. Most likely he had had a good meal that day and had no interest whatsoever on us. We noticed the cuts and bruises on his face, that could have been results of the many fights he would have had.
(Yala National Park; April 2018)