The category “natural causes,” in the case of African lions, includes the kind of murder and mayhem that occurs routinely among competing members of the species. As the lion expert Craig Packer once told me, “The number one cause of death for lions, in an undisturbed environment, is other lions.” This was five years ago, when photographer Mike (Nick) Nichols and I were in Tanzania, doing fieldwork for a story on lion behavior and ecology. C-Boy, a handsome male in his prime, with a black-fringed mane, became the central figure of that story—“The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion”—because he stood as an exception to this mortal rule.

Several years prior, C-Boy had barely survived a