A pair of campers were met with the terrifying prospect of a lion inside their tent before the predator made off with one of their pillows.
Robert Hofmeyr and his brother-in-law Andy Caldwell were preparing for a day Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, South Africa when they spotted a lion appearing from the dark dawn.
Scary footage shows a male lion grasping one of the pillows in his jaws as it darted out of the tent when the headlights were flashed on it.
Over the course of a few minutes, the lion sniffed around the tent as Robert and Andy watched on from the relative safety of their car before it finally fled.
Robert said: It was a pretty terrifying experience. Luckily we were unharmed.
What scared me in retrospect, is that I had just happened to look in the direction the lion was approaching from.
If I had not looked up, or if he had approached from behind the car or tent, we would only have noticed him when he was a couple of metres away.
If that had happened, I think I would have run away, which would have been a very bad idea.
When we returned we saw the naughty lion exiting the tent with Andy's beloved pillow.
He walked a short distance into the grass and lay down with the pillow for a while, before returning to the tent and attempting to steal my sleeping bag.
This was not acceptable, so we started the vehicle, hooting and driving closer to the tent to scare him off.
Thankfully he dropped the sleeping bag and moved a short distance before he grabbed one of our camping chairs and carried it off into the bush.
After a while he returned, but we kept the vehicle close to the tent so he could not enter it again. He sniffed around for a while, then eventually moved off.
The grass was very long, so we were unsure how far he had gone, so we jumped out of the vehicle, zipped up the tent, then headed off for our morning drive.
On our return a few hours later we were able to find the pillow an camping chair, covered in lion slobber and a little bit ripped but still usable.
Inside the tent, the lion had ripped my bag and my camping mattress, which was later a very interesting insurance claim.
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