Safari Sunrise

The sky was still pink when Bea and Daddy arrived at the wildlife park. The car park was empty. A man in a green jacket yawned and waved them through. 'We're the first ones here!' Bea said, pressing her nose against the car window so hard it left a smudge.

The gates opened with a creak, and they drove in slowly, windows down. The air smelled like hay and warm earth and something wild - something that was definitely not the supermarket. 'It smells like animals,' Bea said. Daddy nodded. 'That's because it's full of them.'

The first animal appeared almost immediately. A giraffe, standing right beside the road, so tall that Bea had to lean all the way back in her car seat to see its head. Its neck went up and up and up, past the fence post, past the tree. It was chewing something, and it looked down at their car with calm brown eyes that had eyelashes longer than Bea's fingers.

'One giraffe!' Bea counted, holding up one finger. It was going to be that kind of morning - the counting kind.

Next came the zebras - three of them, standing in a line like they were waiting for a bus. 'One, two, three zebras!' Bea said. Daddy made the car go extra slow so she could see their stripes. Up close, the stripes curved and swirled in ways that made each zebra look like it was wearing a different jumper.

'No two zebras have the same pattern,' Daddy told her. 'They're like fingerprints.' Bea looked at her own fingers, studying the tiny lines. Then she looked back at the zebras. 'Cool,' she said. One of the zebras flicked its tail and walked away, as if it had heard enough about fingerprints.

The elephants were having breakfast. The big one used its trunk to pick up a whole bundle of hay - bigger than Bea - and stuff it into its mouth like a giant sandwich. 'Two elephants!' said Bea. The baby elephant stood close to its mother, flapping its ears like two grey fans. Bea waved at it through the window. The baby elephant flapped its ears even faster. 'It waved back!' Bea said. Daddy said it was probably just the flies, but Bea knew better.

They drove past the rhinos, who were grey and enormous and not doing much of anything. 'They're like rocks with legs,' Bea said. The rhinos did not disagree.

By the lake, flamingos stood on one leg in the shallow water - a soft, dusty pink, the colour of the sky at sunrise. Bea tried standing on one leg too, but her car seat made it tricky.

She counted carefully, pointing at each one. 'Ten, eleven, twelve.' Daddy squinted. 'I can only see eleven.' Bea pointed at a bush near the edge of the lake. 'The twelfth one is behind there. It's hiding.' Daddy didn't argue.

The last stop was the meerkats. They stood on their hind legs on a sandy mound, bolt upright, turning their heads this way and that, like tiny lifeguards scanning the beach. Bea tried to count them - one, two, three - but the third one ducked into a hole and a different one popped out somewhere else. They kept swapping places, disappearing and reappearing like a magic trick. 'Lots,' Bea decided. 'Lots and lots of meerkats.' She held up all ten fingers, then folded them down and held them up again. Daddy said that was a good system.

The car turned toward the exit. The morning sun was higher now, warm and golden, and the car park was filling with other families who had missed the quiet, perfect hour that Bea and Daddy had all to themselves.

On the drive home, Bea's eyes grew heavy. One giraffe. Three zebras. Two elephants. Some rocks with legs. Twelve flamingos, one hiding. Lots and lots of meerkats. The morning sun warmed her face through the window, and the world scrolled past in soft green and gold.

'Best morning,' she murmured, her voice already sliding toward sleep.

And then, between one breath and the next, between the zebras in her memory and the elephants in her dreams, Bea was asleep. Daddy drove home slowly, windows still down, carrying his sleeping explorer back to the ordinary world.