Part of the Pride (32 page)

Napoleon, as I've mentioned, is one of the few male lions I have encountered who will allow me to hang with him and carry on as normal while he is in the company of a lioness in estrus. This not only makes him easy to work with, but also a pleasure to be around all the time. Making what is possibly the biggest understatement of the year, I can definitely say it's best to stay away from a male lion while he's mating. Otherwise, he'll most likely rip your head off.

For the film we wanted a shot of Napoleon walking towards the camera with an intent look on his face. I knew he would be “intense” if he thought his current girlfriend, Tabby, was being taken away from him. Napoleon didn't mind me being in the enclosure with him and Tabby, but when I loaded her into a truck while she was in estrus, he followed her with a very intent look in his eye. By using Tabby as the lure, instead of the giant pink chicken, we were able to film Napoleon with a different expression on his face. We would drive Tabby to the far end of the airstrip and Napoleon would then come bounding down to meet her—and sometimes get his reward, though she would stay in the vehicle.

It worked a treat the first time we tried it. As Napoleon got closer to his girlfriend he would look around and sniff the air, catching her scent and giving us some more magic footage to work with in the film.

The second time we tried this technique, several months later, we loaded Tabby and Napoleon and drove them to the property we were working on. “This is going to work like a charm,” I said out loud.

We unloaded Napoleon then drove off with Tabby. When Napoleon set off after Tabby, he didn't really walk the route we had planned for the cameras, so we decided to load him again and drive back to the start point to repeat the whole process.

On this particular day Rodney Fuhr had come out to the set,
along with his brother and some other people, to see the filming. I walked Napoleon over to the truck, and as I opened the cage door at the rear to let him in, Tabby elbowed past us and bounded out into the grass.

With everyone looking on, I now had two lions out roaming free and, even worse, one of them was in estrus. It was the story of my life and a lesson I had clearly not learned yet: lions act up in front of visitors. Tabby walked off in the direction of the farm's perimeter fence. Napoleon followed her.

“Quick, let's load Napoleon before we lose them both,” I said to Rodney as we drove down the track in pursuit of the lions. Fortunately, Napoleon was more interested in the offer of a handful of meat that day than he was in his girlfriend. I was able to load him, but Tabby refused to come when called, or even to change direction with the promise of meat. All I could do was follow Tabby patiently as she walked towards the distant fence. To make matters worse, and even more embarrassing, she would sit down every two hundred meters and have a little rest. She would gobble up a chunk of meat if I set it down in front of her, but she would not be persuaded to walk in any direction other than the one she had set for herself.

We walked like that, stopping and starting, for more than three hours, until it was after dark. At some point late in the afternoon, Tabby changed her course and took the long route back to her enclosure, over the rocky spur that runs through Rodney's property. She wasn't aggressive or angry, just determined to do her own thing, and as she looked at me from time to time, I swear she was sniggering at me. It was the unspoken language again, and this time she was telling me she would go home in her own sweet time.

“Shit, we lost a whole afternoon of filming, right in front of the boss. What a disaster,” I said to Rodney Nombekana when I finally locked the gate on Tabby's enclosure. I wondered aloud if Tabby had acted as she did because she was mad at me.

“No,” Rodney Nombekana said to me. “I think Tabby picked up
on the stress you've been under and wanted to give you a break from filming. I think she saw you needed to chill and spend an afternoon doing nothing.”

Maybe he was right.

In one scene in the film, Letsatsi is harassed by a pack of hyenas. One of the hyenas I chose to star in the film was Chucky, the same one who, with Bonnie, had once escaped from the park. He had mellowed in his maturity.

We were filming at the Kingdom of the White Lion, where I now live with Mandy and my animals, but Chucky lived at the Lion Park at Muldersdrift, about half an hour's drive away, down the R512, a notoriously busy stretch of road that leads from Johannesburg out past Lanseria Airport to the Hartbeespoort Dam. Increasing numbers of people have moved to estates near the dam to escape Johannesburg's crime, so what was once a fairly quiet rural road has now become a popular commuter route. When people used to ask me if I was ever worried about working with so-called “dangerous” animals at the park, I used to tell them that the biggest risk I faced in life was driving to work each day on the R512.

Normally we would transport animals in a special caged truck, but that was being used elsewhere on the day Helga and I needed to fetch Chucky, so we took a normal
bakkie
, a pickup with a fiberglass canopy covering the load area in the rear. Chucky, despite his earlier escapades with his partner in crime, Bonnie, had become a well-behaved tame hyena, and like others of his kind I have known, he enjoyed riding in cars.

“You drive, Helga,” I said, after we had loaded the obedient Chucky effortlessly into the vehicle. I closed the rear hatch of the canopy, locking Chucky securely inside. “I'll keep an eye on our passenger.”

About three minutes after leaving the park, Chucky decided the
rubber surround on one of the canopy's windows looked like a tasty treat. He began gnawing on the seal.

“Chucky! Stop that, boy. You'll ruin the
bakkie.
” To make matters worse, it was a hired vehicle.

He kept chewing on the rubber strips like there was no tomorrow. Then, boom! The whole window fell out of the canopy and shattered on the road as Helga was driving.

“Helga, stop!”

She slowed and looked back over her shoulder, but even though the vehicle was still moving, Chucky leapt out of the gaping hole in the canopy onto the R512, just after the turn-off to the N14 Motorway, a major arterial traffic route.

“Slam on the brakes, Helga!”

Helga pulled off the road, but I jumped out before she had fully stopped. I was already having visions of headlines about a hyena on the loose near Lanseria Airport or, worse for me, a squashed hyena.

Chucky was on the road, bounding away, and I chased after him, arms and legs pumping as I ran down the broken white line that divided the two lanes of traffic.

“Chucky!”

A car swerved, narrowly missing me, while two others screeched to a halt, their tires squealing on the tar road. I gained on Chucky and leapt at him, bringing him down in the middle of the road with a flying rugby tackle. We rolled on the hot tar surface while more cars swerved and skidded around us.

Helga drove the
bakkie
up to where I was and I stood, picking Chucky up in my arms and admonishing him as I staggered to the side of the road. Horns blared behind me and other drivers and their passengers just gawped, open-mouthed, not believing what had just taken place in front of their eyes.

“Shit, we can't put him back in the canopy,” I said to Helga, breathing heavily while I recovered from the chase.

The only place we could put Chucky, to make sure he didn't
make another run for it, was between us on the front seat of the pickup. Chucky was grinning from ear to ear as he peered out of the windscreen from his prime perch between Helga and me. God knows what people in the oncoming cars thought, but Chucky looked and acted like he rode to work on the R512 like that every day.

The rest of Chucky's day was relatively uneventful, but Mandy was studying marketing at night school at the time, and when she came home that evening she related a story one of her fellow students had told her.

“This guy in class says, ‘Mandy, you won't believe what happened to me today. I was driving down the R512 behind this
bakkie
and the next thing this hyena jumps out, followed by this guy who runs after him, wrestles him to the ground, and loads him in the front seat.' ”

“What did you say to him?” I asked Mandy.

“That's my boyfriend.”

My cell phone rang. “Kev, the production vehicle's been hijacked and stolen.”

I swore and braced myself for the news. No one had been injured in the attack, which was a blessing, but there were tapes from the filming of
White Lion
on board the car, and they were missing. Ironically, the footage was being taken to the production house for safe keeping. The driver had stopped outside the building where he was dropping the tapes, and hooted his horn to get the security people inside to let him in the gate. When no one appeared, he decided to leave the vehicle and go inside to find someone. He was gone for two minutes, and when he emerged the production car was being driven away. The driver tried to jump in front of the criminals and stop them, but they were too fast for him.

Crime is an unfortunate fact of life everywhere in the world, but it's particularly bad in Johannesburg. People are killed for their
cars in this city, so our driver was lucky. “How many tapes are missing?” I asked. Perhaps it wasn't as bad as I feared.

“Thirty-two.”

Now I started to panic. I'm a glass-half-full kind of person, so I organized production to go through the tape register so we could work out what was missing. It was bad.

Missing were hours of footage of the fight between our white and brown lions with the skin-clad animatronic lion; helicopter shots of wide-open expanses of Nash's farm, which had cost a fortune to shoot; and hours and hours of behavioral footage we had filmed with a camera inside an enclosure with a pride of lions. It was all gone.

We went through the usual channels, dealing with the police, and we went on air on the local radio stations and contacted the newspapers, offering a reward for the return of the stolen tapes. We didn't care about the vehicle, just the video. We received one call that led us to two of the missing tapes. It appeared the perpetrators had dumped the cargo as it was the vehicle they were interested in, but there was no trace of the remaining thirty tapes.

To make matters worse, there happened to be no useable footage on the two tapes we did recover. We had actually finished shooting by that point, but now I was faced with the task of organizing yet another season of filming. We were coming out of the rainy summer months at the time of the theft and the grass on the Highveld was drying to yellow, so we couldn't simply go out and start the cameras rolling again immediately. We had to wait until the summer of 2007–2008 to start again, and there was no way I could guarantee that we could recreate the amazing behavior we had captured on the missing tapes.

The extent of what we had lost was there for all of us to see, as all of the master tapes which had been stolen had been copied onto a lower resolution DV cam format. We did our first edit on DV cam, with the idea that we would later go back to the high-definition master tapes to do the final conform, but we couldn't use the DV
cam dubs in the film as the quality wasn't good enough. It was heart-wrenching to lose all that film and the work we did, but in many ways the worst thing was that I was spending more time working on the film and dealing with all the problems than I was with the animals.

We had to reshoot the scenes with the animatronic lion, dressed in either its white or brown skin. It wasn't easy the first time around, and the second try took a lot of planning and preparation, as well.

The robot lion's paws, legs, jaw, neck, and body were hydraulically operated and electrically powered, with the juice coming from a generator. There was a lot of cable which had to be buried and the whole contraption had to be staked firmly into the ground so that when the fight began the real lion didn't totally destroy the fake one. Safety was a big issue, as well, as the real lion hopefully would be fighting the animatronic beast for real. We wanted to see real aggression on the set, so the crew was safely ensconced in a cage of wire and steel plate. I, of course, would be out with the lion, doing my best to keep things under control.

The plan was to have the brown lion fight the animatronic lion wearing the white skin, and then the reverse. After that we would edit the images together so that we had the best bits of the real and robotic action on film. The trick is to use less of the animatronic lion—whatever the color—and more of the real animals in action.

Different lions react in different ways, but generally they become possessive and defensive when it comes to food, so the idea was to show the real lion some food and then, just as it got interested in its meal, we would pull a cover off the animatronic lion and start it up.

With the crew safely locked in their cage, I walked Napoleon onto the set and showed him his meat, which caught his attention. When I uncovered the animatronic foe, he growled and lunged at it, sinking his fangs into the machine's neck. Unfortunately, at that
point Napoleon, smart lion that he is, realized the thing was fake. He let go of it, sat down, and finished his meat.

The animatronics people had told me that they were concerned about their mechanical lion injuring one of my real lions. I think they wanted to make their worries known in advance, in case there were questions of liability.

“This thing is hydraulically powered and very strong. If it gets into a grip with your lion it could really hurt it—even break its back,” one of the guys warned me.

“Dude, do you realize how strong a
real
lion is?” I countered. “These things are built to take down buffalo and giraffe.”

We got into a debate about which would be stronger—real lion or animatronic lion, and despite my bravado the designer's words were starting to sink in. Maybe I was wrong.

I think we were all a bit relieved by Napoleon's first go at the animatronic lion, but more action was required, so we decided to unleash Thunder, the lion that had nailed the wildebeest during our ill-fated walk in the Lion Park with Rain.