A Wild Estate

Lions on the deck. Warthog butt prints on the walls. Chair yoga at sunset.

This is what late-life reinvention looks like for David Muirhead and his wife. At seventy, they traded a manicured coastal home for a cottage deep in the South African bush, just outside Hoedspruit — the country's self-styled safari capital. After decades of journalism and wildlife writing, Muirhead now lives inside the world he used to observe from a distance.

He notices things. That wild animals don't grow old — they get eaten long before they can be considered geriatric. That an elephant has its own opinions about your morning plans. That a leopard, unhurried, makes its own argument about what really matters at this stage of life.

A Wild Estate is funny, tender, and unsentimental — a memoir of growing older with the bush watching back.

David Muirhead is a journalist and author with books that including Cat Among the Pigeons,The Bedside Ark and The Clamour King. For the past four years, he has lived in the bush near South Africa’s Kruger National Park, regularly visited by elephants, lions, giraffe and even a few human beings from time to time.