She is the ultimate predator - a sleek and stealthy killer. Pouncing on her prey, she silences the baboon with one swipe of a vicious paw. Then, suddenly, something stirs in the dead animal’s fur, and the law of the jungle is rewritten.

From the bedraggled pelt of her kill crawls a tiny infant - a one-day-old baboon. In that moment, this young leopard forgets she is a hunter, and nurtures the baby baboon as if it were her own cub.

Smelling blood, a pack of hyenas gather to finish off the kill. Legadema, as she has been named by the camera crew who took these moving shots, carefully carries the baby baboon high up into a tree for protection. There, she cuddles the newborn to her for warmth through the long, African night.

“It was as if nature had turned on its head completely,” says Dereck Joubert, a filmmaker who followed Legadema for three-and-a-half years in her natural habitat, the Okavango Delta of Botswana - the verdant flood plains known as Africa’s Garden of Eden.

Source: Daily Mail