Queen of Shaba: The story of an African leopard - Joy Adamson

Three years ago Joy Adamson embarked on the most difficult of her adventures with the great African cats, which began with the saga of Elsa the lioness and was followed by the story of her cheetah, Pippa.

In November 1976 Joy was given an orphaned leopard called Penny, with the intention that she would ultimately return the cub to the wild when it was able to look after itself. For some months Joy hand-reared Penny at her home at Lake Naivasha where the cub became devoted to her. Then began a search to find a suitable reserve in which to release Penny. It was a long time before Joy was invited to visit the reserve at Shaba but when she saw it she realized that it was a leopard paradise. With great determination and infinite patience, Joy helped Penny to become self-supporting there.

In the bush of northern Kenya with its ever-changing beauty, its remoteness, its cruelty and its primeval innocence, there were threats from flood, lions, baboons—the natural prey and enemy of the leopard—and finally, fire.

Surviving these hazards, Penny mated with a wild leopard and against all informed predictions encouraged Joy to visit the lair in which she suckled her newly born pair of cubs. Although this story echoes those of the lioness and the cheetah, the entirely different characters of the three great cats are constantly borne out by Penny's developing behavior. QUEEN OF SHABA reveals just how much more difficult it was to raise and return Penny to the wild than it had been Elsa and Pippa. Nevertheless, by the end of 1979 Joy Adamson had lived to see her latest experiment triumphantly succeed (and to complete this book) only to die so tragically a few days later.