A Wild Estate: Twilight Years in the African Bush, an Intimate Geographies Book by David Muirhead

This is what late-life reinvention looks like for David Muirhead and his wife. At seventy, they traded a manicured coastal home for a cottage deep in the South African bush, just outside Hoedspruit — the country's self-styled safari capital. After decades of journalism and wildlife writing, Muirhead now lives inside the world he used to observe from a distance.

He notices things. That wild animals don't grow old — they...