For many animals that hunt, the night is the time they prowl and stalk. In the darkness, there is a fear. We knew that because we feel it in the African night. Human consciousness was born in Africa, and we are not so far along that we do not sometimes feel within us the stirring of the predator, the fear of prey. But our emotions are not the emotions of, say, a lioness seeking food. She has no sense of cruelty, no feeling of pity. She is keeping herself and her cubs alive. She is in a struggle for life, a struggle that we can understand and admire, perhaps because there is still within us that ageless sense of the hunter. And perhaps there is envy when we gaze upon an animal so strong and fleet.

Animals do not seem to anticipate death. A gazelle or a zebra flees a predator not because it fears death, but because it has seen or smelled something that has triggered its flight behavior. They flee not because they flee death but because they seek survival. One may fall prey to the hunter, but others will live on. Like the hunter, they are locked in a cycle of life and death.

Sometimes, when the animal dies, other members of the herd gather to watch at a distance. They seem to have a calmness about them, a sense that death is as inevitable as birth.