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He attracted lions to the dolls using calls of scavenging hyenas. He named them Lothario, Fabio, Romeo and Julio (as in Iglesias-this was the late 1990s). He asked a Dutch toy company to craft four plush, life-size lions with light and dark manes of different lengths. But because lions are the only social felines, Packer thought manes were more likely a message or a status symbol. A male lion is the only cat with a mane some scientists believed its function was to protect an animal’s neck during fights. One of Packer’s more sensational experiments took aim at a longstanding mystery. “The scale of the lion study and Craig Packer’s vigor as a scientist are pretty unparalleled,” says Laurence Frank, of the University of California at Berkeley, who studies African lions and hyenas. When the lions went to war, as they are inclined to do, he was their Homer. Over the decades there have been plagues, births, invasions, feuds and dynasties. Packer’s reward has been an epic kind of science, a detailed chronicle of the lives and doings of generations of prides: the Plains Pride, the Lost Girls 2, the Transect Truants. And he has braved the boredom of studying a creature that slumbers roughly 20 hours a day and has a face as inscrutable as a sphinx’s.

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He has learned to lob a defrosted ox heart full of medicine toward a hungry lion for a study of intestinal parasites. He has honed his distressed wildebeest calf call to get his subjects’ attention. He has collected lion blood, milk, feces and semen. He has persisted through cholera outbreaks, bouts of malaria and a 1994 canine distemper epidemic that killed off a third of the 300 lions he’d been following. It is the most extensive carnivore study ever conducted. Packer has been running the Serengeti Lion Project for 31 of its 43 years. It is furnished with a faux leopard-skin couch and supplied only sporadically with electricity (the researchers turn it off during the day to save energy) and fresh water (elephants dug up the pipelines years ago). He has spent a good chunk of his life at the park’s Lion House, a concrete, fortress-like structure that includes an office, kitchen and three bedrooms. Packer, 59, is tall, skinny and sharply angular, like a Serengeti thorn tree. Its eyes were yellow and cold like new doubloons. The beast yawned and, nestling its tremendous head on its paws, shifted its gaze to us for the first time. Unimpressed, the lion briefly turned its back, showing hindquarters as smooth as cast bronze.

Its handsome face was raked with claw marks. He snatched a stone and tossed it in the big male’s direction. Packer, though, opened the door and hopped out. Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh 400 pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species. The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number.

Since arriving in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park only that morning, I’d gaped at wildebeests on parade, dawdling baboons, gazelles rocketing by, oxpecker birds hitching rides atop Cape buffaloes, hippos with bubblegum-colored underbellies. From a distance it looked like a deposed lord, grand and pitiable. He pointed out the lion’s scraped elbow and a nasty puncture wound on its side. Packer, a University of Minnesota ecologist and the world’s leading lion expert, spun the wheel of the Land Rover and drove straight toward the animal. It was a dark-maned male, elaborately sprawled, as if it had fallen from a great height. Craig Packer was behind the wheel when we came across the massive cat slumped in the shade beneath a spiny tree.