Part of the Pride (24 page)

I was at the vet's one day and someone brought in a South American jaguar. It was a stunning animal. When I got back to the Lion Park I told the guys what I'd seen, and unwittingly set the wheels in motion for the animal to be purchased for the park.

Personally, I'd always thought we should stick to African animals, but other people thought it should be a predator park, so we soon found ourselves with a jaguar named Jade, after Rodney Fuhr's stepdaughter. The jaguar was beautiful, with a richly colored coat, similar to that of a leopard's but with larger, more vivid rosettes. Beautiful . . . and bad.

Jade was a terror—in fact, she was a witch. At seven months she was attacking people. Helga was the only one of us who had some success with Jade, who otherwise wanted to murder everyone and everything that got in her way. She had a thing about jackets and attacked many a staff member in order to get her claws on their clothes. Once she got hold of something, she claimed it. She was very possessive.

One morning I was doing the rounds and when I stopped by Jade's enclosure, she wasn't there. “Oh, no!”

I moved on to Meg and Ami, who were living next door with a mixed bunch of other brown and white lionesses. To my surprise I saw that Jade was in with them. She had scaled the high fence of
her enclosure, paw over paw, and landed in with two exuberant lionesses who dwarfed her. Something had happened—Jade had finally met her match. The lionesses had obviously sorted her out during the night, but she was still in one piece, and sitting in there with them quite placidly.

Meg and Ami and Jade all still live together, and while the girls put Jade in her place, they are still wary of her. She's still a witch, though the lionesses keep her in check.

I've been criticized for deliberately putting different species in together, but I've only ever done it when I thought it was in the animal's best interest. Jade would have been a solitary animal in the wild, but she needed a mature female—or two—to sort her out and teach her some discipline. I've also put hyena cubs in with lions and they've gotten on fine. Lions and hyenas are sociable animals that live in a hierarchical society. They like company, and despite good old conventional wisdom, they are not natural born enemies. At the moment I have a hyena called Spannies who is living with some feisty six-month-old lion cubs. They're all the same age, and while the lions already dwarf Spannies, there is no doubt that the little hyena thinks he rules his mixed clan. I'll separate them eventually and put Spannies back with the hyenas—an extremely complicated process—but for now they're all learning about relationships.

I might have become part of the pride of lions and an honorary member of Uno's hyena clan, but at the Lion Park I was still an employee. I had formed relationships with the animals I worked with, but I had no real control over their destinies.

Mandy and I went on leave for a beach holiday at Knysna on the Garden Route, about 1,500 kilometers from Johannesburg. Some people think I never take leave, but I do. I'm a normal person in that respect, though Mandy will tell you that after three weeks away from my lions I'm like a bear with a sore head.

When I got back to work on a Monday morning I was walking around saying hi to all my animal companions. When I got to Meg and Ami's enclosure, I called them but they weren't there.

“Where're the girls?” I asked Ian, the park manager.

“We sold them.”

“You
what?
Fuck! No way. How can you sell my lions?”

“Kev,” Ian explained patiently, “they're not actually your lions.”

“You sold my soul mates.” It turned out Meg and Ami had been purchased by a guy who wanted some new females to ensure genetic diversity among the lions on his private game reserve. It was like having two of my children sold into slavery.

I had a lot of respect for Ian, but he was busy making business decisions while I was busy making relationships. I was still furious. I knew Ian was right, that it wasn't my call to make, but I still couldn't believe that anyone would have sold those two lionesses in particular without consultation. It wasn't like we didn't have lionesses to spare. We had plenty of other “wild” lions—those that hadn't been tamed or grown up around humans—who would have been perfect for the game reserve's needs. I didn't imagine the owner had especially asked for two tame lionesses.

I went to Rodney Fuhr and asked if we could get Meg and Ami back.

“And just how are we going to do that?” Rodney asked.

Rodney was the park's owner—and by now like a father to me—but I couldn't abandon Meg and Ami. “I'll call the reserve. We'll give them two other lionesses.”

“All right, Kev,” Rodney said.

Ian, to his credit, called the reserve and they agreed to the exchange. The reserve's own er drove to the park with two lionesses on the back of his truck.

“Here are your lions,” he said, opening one of the boxes. The first lioness jumped out and looked around her. She clearly had no idea where she was.

“That's not one of my lions,” I said. I checked the other box, but neither Meg nor Ami had been brought back.

“
Ag
, all lions look the same. How do you know the difference?” the man asked.

“How do you recognize your dog?” I spat back at him. “How do you know your sons? That's how I know these lions.”

The man scoffed, but we put the lions back in their boxes and I told the man I was going to his place to bring back Meg and Ami. He shrugged and got back into his vehicle.

We loaded two crates onto the back of the Toyota pickup and took Helga with me for the drive to the game reserve. It was about an hour and a half deeper into the rolling hills and farming country of North West Province, and I broke all the speed limits on the way. I was still seething. I'd learned that Meg and Ami had been put into a pride of fifteen lionesses and they had been with them for two weeks already. I was sure I would know them as soon as I saw them and was equally sure they would remember me.

When we got to the reserve, the own er and his wife offered us drinks and muffins, but I was impatient to see my girls again. In his own good time he led us to where he was keeping the lions, and I was sure he was quietly sniggering at me on the way. The lions were in a temporary enclosure, where the man was building up the pride prior to releasing them into the reserve. They had no shade; just bare earth with a man-made mound in the middle of their yard.

“So how are you going to recognize them from this distance?” the man asked me. “Or are you going to walk in there with all those lions?” He was clearly still very skeptical.

“I'll call them.”

The own er just shook his head, as if I was a madman.

“Meg! Ami!”

Two lionesses lifted their heads and stood. They bounded over to the fence to me. The other cats ignored them, and the humans outside.

“Hello, my girlies!” They started talking back to me and rubbing themselves against the fence.

“Jeez, man,” the reserve's own er said in his thick Afrikaans accent, “I can't believe those things know you, and know their own names. So now how do you get them out of there and into the boxes? I had to drug the other two to move them.”

“Watch,” I said.

I had the two boxes brought over and when I opened the gate a little, just wide enough for a lioness to squeeze through, I called Meg. She walked over and straight into the box. Once she was secured and the other box was in place, Ami did the same thing. We put them on the truck and we all went home. The guy was dumbstruck.

That incident was one of the defining moments of my life. It was the point at which I realized that I didn't have any control over these animals' lives. They could be sold at any time. Would I have to play favorites next time the park had to sell a lion? I didn't have the means at the time to buy up all the animals I had developed relationships with. I'd started at the Lion Park as a visitor, then moved on to become a part-time and eventually full-time employee. My job was initially to enrich the lives of the animals under my care, but what use was there in getting them to trust a human if they could be sold off?

The future of animals in my care remains a predicament for me to this day. I had to face the fact that I simply couldn't keep every animal I was close to, especially once they bred and produced cubs. Even now, space and money are issues. It takes both to enclose predators properly.

What use, I wondered back then, was being part of a pride of lions, with equal ranking to the two senior males—my brothers—if I couldn't protect them?

ELEVEN
 
Lights, Camera, Action . . . Sometimes

 

 

 

I learned the hard way where the theatrical expression “break a leg” comes from.

We had made a few television commercials at the Lion Park and were getting involved with documentary making when the French production company came to Africa in search of lions, locations, and wranglers to help them make their feature film,
The Lion
.

I helped put together the pitch on behalf of the Lion Park, and realized pretty soon that this was going to be very different from any filming work we had done in the past. For a commercial, we might need to work one or two lions for half a day, but filming
The Lion
was going to take about four weeks of shooting, using our animals every day. I had to put together a schedule and work out if we could supply enough lions and how we would share the workload among them. The most exciting part of the whole thing was that my boys, Tau and Napoleon, were going to be the stars of the show if we won the business.

The weekend before we were due to start shooting, I went to watch a friend of mine racing motorcycles at Kyalami. After the
race my buddy showed me one of the new Big Boy 100cc motorized scooters that he had started bringing into South Africa. This wasn't your garden variety commuter scooter, it was a big boy.

“Take it for a spin, Kev,” my mate said. “It goes like the clappers.”

I climbed on, pressed the starter, and revved it. When I took off I realized he wasn't kidding. The scooter was a fantastic little machine and it had some serious power. As I was putting the scooter through its paces, a guy pulled his car out of a parking space in front of me without checking his rearview mirror. I hit the anchors and the scooter screeched to a halt, but as it stopped, the rear end swung round. I had put a leg out and the back of the bike smashed into my ankle. I cursed and groaned with pain.

“Shit, Kev, are you all right?” my friend asked as he ran up to the scene of the accident.

“
Ja
, I'm sure it's fine,” I said, hobbling to one side of the street. “I'm sure it's just sprained.”

I limped around for the rest of the day, and tried to kill the pain with a few beers when I got home, but as the evening wore on I realized that this was the worst sprained ankle I had ever suffered. Next morning it was swollen like a balloon and the pain wasn't abating. I asked Mandy to take me to the doctor.

“Lion or hyena,” the admissions nurse asked, as usual, when she saw me limp in.

“Scooter.” I blushed a little, I think.

The doctor ordered an X-ray and later confirmed the bone was broken. “We're going to have to put you in a plaster cast,” he said.

“No way. I'm filming for the next month.”

“Kev, you can't put pressure on your ankle. You've got to rest up and take it easy.”

“Doc, you don't understand. I have to put pressure on it and a cast is just no good. I'll be walking through dirt and mud for the next four weeks working with my lions.”

The doctor shook his head at my stubbornness or stupidity—I
don't know which—and then decided to try me out with a new device, a plastic “moon boot.” He slipped the boot over my broken ankle and then inflated it with air. The pressure kept the bones in place and provided a cushion under the foot, which would hopefully allow me to walk.

I hobbled out of Sunninghill on crutches, but when I got home and tried to walk without them, it was too bloody sore. “Shit,” I thought to myself. How was I going to wrangle lions on film sets in the outdoors and in studios if I couldn't walk? What an ass I was, getting myself into this situation. I saw my film career vanishing before it had even taken off the ground.

When I arrived at the Lion Park on crutches on Monday morning, I was greeted by a show of shaking heads and negative comments.

“There's no way you can go in with the lions like that, Kev,” one of my colleagues said.

“You know the old story, man,” another said. “Lions always look for the injured and lame. Your buddies will think you're prey—they're going to eat you.”

“Bull,” I said to them all. I had spent half my life in the doctor's surgery and the other half doing things people told me I shouldn't or couldn't do.

Angry at myself, and determined to prove everyone wrong, I set off slowly for Tau and Napoleon's enclosure. When I opened the gate, resting awkwardly on my crutches, and closed it, the two big lions wandered towards me through the grass. Immediately, they sensed that something was different with me.