In January 7, 2003 a spectacular friendship was forged between a lioness and a baby oryx in Samburu wildlife reserve. In a radical departure from its instincts, the lioness protected the little calf for 15 days since its birth. Ordinarily it would have killed the oryx for a meal. Instead, the predator escorted it around the Samburu wildlife and kept away other carnivorous beasts.

The tale of a top predator making alliance with a herbivore, it's usual prey, defied all logic. However, the tourists, villagers, journalists and even wildlife workers who flocked the Samburu nature reserve were not interested in logic. Their interest was in this odd friendship.

This is how a Nation reporter recorded the extraordinary tale: In a radical departure from its instincts, the lioness protected the little calf, which it would ordinarily have killed for a meal, escorting it around the Samburu wildlife reserve.

Truck loads of tourists kept following the pair as they strolled around the foot of Koitogor Hills, near the Serena Samburu Lodge. Alongside game workers the tourists watched daily in disbelief as the lioness and the frail brown calf wandered the range side by side and lay down to rest together, with all the intimacy of a mother and her cub.

Had the lioness adopted the oryx as her own? What powerful drive overrode all her instincts to kill? No scientific explanation had been offered for the strange friendship which lasted for an amazing 15 days before the law of the jungle reigned supreme and sadly an older lion from another pride killed the calf.

Death came suddenly when the odd couple strayed into the territory of another lion, which spotted easy prey. The predator pounced as the lioness turned her back to drink from the Uaso Nyiro river, on Sunday evening.

It was an unusual lapse of care on the lioness's part. For the time they were together, she had successfully warded off all dangers to the frail little calf, including threats from a pride of cheetahs, by walking watchfully behind it as it would with its own cubs. The lioness is said to have taken over the calf after frightening off its mother at birth. The two animals soon settled to their separate feeding routines.

Tourists interviewed by the Nation after witnessing the episode were lost for words while others saw it as another wonder of the world.

The two animals have sharply contrasting habits. Lions are voracious carnivores and commonly prey on browsers like antelopes, water bucks and zebras. The oryx is a gentle herbivore, which survives on grass and leaves, and spends much of its time dodging predators such as big cats, mainly by its speed, although the adults are also adept at defending themselves with their long sword-like horns.

The lioness sleeps for up to 16 hours a day and is active for only eight, while the oryx spends 65 per cent of its time browsing. Lions rely largely on their sight while oryx survive by their sharp sense of smell, which deepened the mystery of how the two had been communicating in the wild.

Samburu rangers had ruled out separating them, preferring to let nature take its course, but like everyone else, they crossed their fingers in the hope that the mysterious relationship would last.

The spectacle had attracted a growing stream of nature lovers, tourists and Samburu villagers. Wildlife experts say that lions - moving in twos or threes - will normally mark out a territory by fighting off the weaker males. They will then subdue the females within the territory by killing all the cubs from previous mates and siring their own as the natural way of ensuring their own perpetuation.

Samburu Serena nature expert Vincent Kapeen said there was a high possibility that the killer lion could have killed the calf while mistaking it for a rival's cub, but then realised that it was actually a meal.

Later an animal expert explained the relationship thus: Like many other predators, the lion has a complex behaviour pattern when hunting. During the hunt, cats execute a series of behaviour such as: Stalking, where the cat sneaks up on its prey; chase, when the predator runs at high speed to catch the prey; catch, depending on the size of prey, different techniques are deployed but all of them resulting in the prey being knocked off its stand, neutralised.

The last behaviour is the kill: Lions often suffocate their prey by biting and closing the windpipe or use "the kiss of death" where the lion bites the muzzle of the prey so the animal cannot breathe.

This series of behaviour is the core of cat's hunting behaviour. However, under some circumstances, there is a key factor in the hunting behaviour that lies on the part of the prey, which is fleeing. Depending on the situation, the predator needs the prey to flee, before the hunting instincts - chase and kill - are evoked.

A full explanation to the "odd couple" is unlikely to ever be revealed, as scientists should need more information on the history of the lioness and the young oryx. Nevertheless, a partial explanation to the phenomenon could be that the oryx calf never fled the lioness. Thus her hunting behaviour was never initialised.

The explanation, on behalf of the oryx, is to be found in the behavioural patterns of the species. The oryx is a social herbivore in some places in East Africa living in herds of up to 200 individuals.

The glue in a group lifestyle like this is, of course, the herd instinct. This instinct is even stronger in young animals. They will, for protection, always follow their mother around.

Therefore, in the "odd couple" case, the young calf was following its basic instincts and thus following the only animal in the vicinity left to follow, the lioness. In other words the unusual constellation was a behavioural dead end - or a checkmate.

It is understandable, or rather human, to see the alliance of the lioness and the oryx calf as friendship. Even to view it as an unusual act of humanism among animals, as the lioness seemed to have adopted the orphaned oryx calf.

However, there is no room for friendships of this sort in the wild. Remarkably, on every account, it is nonetheless, that the alliance lasted a whole 15 days. Ironic too, that the calf would likely have been killed by the male lion, even if it had been a lion cub. That is the way of Mother Nature.