www.iht.com Roused from his lair in the knee-high grass of the Namibian bush, Dewey the cheetah lifted his head toward his latest clutch of gaping humans, maybe nine meters away, and offered a contemptuous stare of the sort that only cats can deliver.

Dean Masika played at reading the animal's mind. "They found me again," he mocked. "How do they do that?"

Simple. Wielding an antenna that resembles an oversized branding iron, Masika leads eco-tourists to Dewey every few days as surely as if the big cat carried a homing beacon - which he does, of course, on a bulky plastic collar around his neck.

But tourism is in some ways an asterisk to these visits. Dewey is one of about 70 cheetahs living on a 4,000-hectare, or 10,000-acre, sanctuary managed by the AfriCat Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping Namibia's big carnivores survive. One purpose of Masika's visits is to see if Dewey, who was rescued as a 2-month-old orphan, has picked up enough hunting skills to make it on his own.

In Namibia, a nation of arid grasslands, there are bigger cats, like lions, and more common ones, like leopards. But cats like Dewey are the ones that grab the attention of wildlife conservationists like AfriCat, and for good reason: Namibia is home to perhaps 3,000 cheetahs, up to one-fourth of the world's population.

A threat to cheetahs here is a threat to the survival of the entire species. Cheetahs are now endangered, found only in Africa and in Iran, where about 200 remain. While adept hunters, they tend to fare poorly in wildlife reserves, where they must compete in a limited territory with lions and leopards.

Even in Namibia, where just 1.7 million people occupy land twice the size of California, wide-open spaces favorable to cheetahs are at a premium. Untamed as much of Namibia seems, its cheetahs and leopards are threatened by development and by conflict with about 7,000 farmers and ranchers who have fenced in most of the arable land and sometimes see the big cats as a threat.

Since the early 1990s, AfriCat and a second nonprofit, the Cheetah Conservation Fund, have rescued and relocated more than 1,600 Namibian cats, most of them cheetahs, and waged campaigns to show landowners how to live peaceably with predators they might otherwise gun down.

The result, says Laurie Marker, the executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, is that a precipitous drop in Namibia's cheetah population has been halted, and numbers have even begun to rise in the last few years. In the 1980s, Namibia's cheetah population shrank by half, with more than 800 killings reported annually to the government. Today that number is about 200.

When Marker began her cheetah-saving campaign in 1990, "probably 90 percent of the people looked at me and thought I was nuts," she said in a telephone interview. "At this point, a good 60 or 70 percent of people within the cheetah's range are very enlightened, and not having any problems with cheetahs."

AfriCat and the Cheetah Conservation Fund encourage farmers and ranchers to forego guns, protecting their livestock with herd dogs and by fencing in calves and lambs. Lately, they have an even more enticing proposition: cheetah-loving tourists, who are flocking to Namibia in ever greater numbers, and often staying and spending money at guest farms.

"There is definitely a change of thinking. Cattle farming is not bringing in the big bucks," Tristan Boehme, a shareholder in AfriCat, said in an interview. "Tourism is growing. With that, the value of wild animals grows, and with every animal having a greater value, farmers will say, 'I don't mind. You can come and release a cat on my property."'

That is more or less how AfriCat began. With their own cattle farm struggling, Wayne Hanssen and his wife, Lisa, invited hunters and birdwatchers to their lodge in the mid-1980s to earn money. Then in 1987, they took pity on a cheetah cub displayed in a bird cage at a cattle auction, and took the cat home. A monitor lizard followed, then a honey badger, then a baboon named Elvis, then another cheetah, Caesar, and a hyena, Dracula. The Hanssens gradually came to see cheetahs as a perfect marriage of animal welfare and business.

The key is to release the animals - usually on other farms - before they lose their fear of humans. But some must be held back, including cubs who were orphaned or were pets until the owners decided they were no longer so cute.

One such cub was Dewey, who arrived at Okonjima in 1997 with his brothers Huey and Louie. Two years later they were released into the larger reserve.

At first, they thrived. Then anthrax killed the brothers, and Dewey, pining for companionship outside his old enclosure, had to be taken in again and paired with another male cheetah.

Early this year, Dewey and his friend were released again into the larger reserve. The second male refused to hunt, but Dewey fared well until June, when Okonjima guides found him lying listlessly beside an oryx he had killed - but not before the large antelope gored him.

Luckily, the animal's horn had missed his vital organs. Stitched up and treated with antibiotics, Dewey was released for the third time. "He already had his first kill that same morning," said Masika, the Okonjima guide.