In the Serengeti, a female cheetah with five cubs works to keep them alive in territory thick with vegetation, moving them at the first sign of danger while she alone must both hunt and stand guard. A second mother, ranging farther out on the open plains, relies on termite mounds as lookout posts to spot approaching danger and prey with an equally large litter of her own. The film follows both as they try to beat cheetah cub mortality, which the narration puts at nine deaths for every ten cubs born, from starvation, predation, and even opportunistic scavengers exploiting a species built for speed rather than strength. Before either female becomes a mother, the film also tracks a coalition of five males trailing a female in estrus for days, tension building among the subordinate males as the dominant one moves in to mate. The two maternal stories run in parallel, one shaped by luck, the other by skill, without settling which mattered more.