Nobody performs for nobody here. That is the thing that takes the longest to understand about spending real time with wild animals. Most of what they do, they do without any awareness of being witnessed. The snow monkey who closes his eyes in the hot spring and disappears entirely into the warmth. The two leopard siblings pressing their faces together in the quiet of the afternoon. The mother whose baby clings to her back and peers out at the world from the safest place it has ever known.

These are not dramatic moments. Nothing is about to happen. Nobody is hunting or being hunted, nobody is waking into something dangerous, nobody is measuring the distance between themselves and the dark.

These are the hours between all of that. The hours that do not make the highlight reel but that tell you more about what a life actually is than anything that does. The tenderness that exists in the wild completely independent of whether anyone is watching.

As it turns out, someone was watching.