Part of the Pride (2 page)

Over the months he was at the Lion Park we became friendly, but even so there was always something not quite right about Tsavo.

My extended family had come to the South African Lion Park, at Muldersdrift on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg, one Sunday for a get-together to celebrate my step-nephew Nicholas's eighth birthday. When I was growing up the Lion Park was out in the countryside, far from the city limits, but the lions now have people living almost on their doorstep. Johannesburg has sprawled outwards, with expensive walled housing estates leapfrogging squatter camps, as humans claim more of the open, grassy veld with each passing year. Wealthy South Africans have fled to the secure estates to escape the city's notoriously violent crime; their maids and gardeners live in makeshift shacks of tin and cardboard in the camps, such as the one across the road from the park.

Visitors to the Lion Park can interact with lion cubs and see hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, leopards, and other predators up close, then drive through large enclosures to see lions and other mammals, such as giraffe, wildebeest, and impala, in the open. It's a taste of the African bush, albeit with the hum of traffic noise as a soundtrack and Johannesburg's skyline in the distance. My mom and sister and brother-in-law, nephews and nieces, and various uncles and aunts were all crammed into one of the trucks we used for game drives in the open areas. The trucks were like mobile cages on wheels, with steel mesh on the side to protect the people inside from lions, and vice versa. After stopping for pictures with some cute little cubs we set off for a tour of the rest of the park, with me as the guide.

At that time I had a little bit of knowledge about lions and I suppose I thought I knew a fair amount. Although I wasn't working
full time at the park I was trusted enough to go into the enclosures with the lions. Unlike other people who worked with dangerous animals, I didn't go in armed with a stick.

“You're
dorf
, man,” other people would say. I didn't think I was crazy, just because I didn't need a stick to form a relationship with an animal. Back then, I was already considered unusual—a bit of a nonconformist—and had a reputation for breaking with convention in the methods I used with the animals. With lions such as Tau and Napoleon, who I considered my brothers, I had developed a relationship based on trust and respect. I'd known them since they were six or seven months old and I had always related to them as one of them, down in the grass at their level, rather than lording it over them with a stick or a whip.

At some point, if you use a stick when you work with an animal, you have to put the stick down. “And anyway,” I would say to my detractors, “what use is a stick going to be if a lion really wants to get you?”

It was one of those perfect autumn days on the South African Highveld. The sky was big and blue, stretching away forever, and while the day was sunny, the air was cool and crisp. There was still some green left to the grass, but it would be golden by the end of the long, dry winter. The whole family was enjoying the outing and they watched from the truck while Uncle Kevin went into the enclosure with Tau and Napoleon and interacted with his two favorite lions. I hugged them and we rubbed our heads against each other in greeting, and to give the relatives something more to watch we kicked a soccer ball around for a while. Back in those days I thought it was important to put on a good show for visitors.

When people ask me what it's like to hold a lion, to be up close to it, the first thing that comes to my mind is power. Not my power over an animal, but the sheer strength these creatures exude, particularly now that Tau and Napoleon were fully grown.

It's like when you put your foot down on the accelerator pedal of
a car with a V8 engine. You don't have to see the engine in action, you can feel it. You can hear it. When you touch a lion's skin for the most part you are feeling sheer muscle, with not an ounce of fat. When it vocalizes or, even better, roars, you feel the vibration in your body.

Then there's the weight of them. Even as youngsters Tau and Napoleon were pretty heavy, but now they weigh nearly six hundred pounds each. When you see a paw up close and try and lift it, you're also trying to heft the weight of that massive forearm, which is the same width as the paw. It's heavy. It's strong enough to bring down a Cape buffalo.

The smell of a lion depends a great deal on what it's been doing and what it's been eating. The amazing thing about lions is they never bathe. The only time they get clean is when it buckets with rain, yet they don't stink. They have a unique odor that I'm so close to I really find it hard to describe. Mandy, my wife, says I'm desensitized to it, though she is not. I find it's like a mixture of pet smells, though not offensive. Not acrid, like cat urine or that musty wet dog smell.

To keep their hair in tip-top shape they excrete an oily substance from behind their ears. That black hair behind the ears, which you'll see when you look closely at a lion, is actually my favourite part. The hair is very soft, almost silky. The rest of the hair on its body varies, as it does on humans, depending on where it is. On the back it's coarser and denser, like a dog's, while on the underbelly and the underside of its legs the coat is again softer. A male's mane is wiry—it needs to be to stand out.

“How does it feel, being able to interact with a lion like you do?” one of my relatives asked, just as many other people have asked me at the park, or over a drink.

The best answer I can give is that the lions are like my buddies, and at the end of a hard day at work it's nice to just sit with your buddies and have a drink and a chat. When I've had a shitty day and I go
and sit with the lions, not saying a word, I walk out feeling recharged—green light, ready to function again. The same goes with the hyenas, leopards, and other animals I live with. Mandy says I'm a new person every time.

When I'd finished the curtain raiser, the show I'd put on with the playful youngsters Tau and Napoleon, I went to the outer fence of the next enclosure, to Tsavo, the bigger, older lion.

“Tsavie! Come, Tsavie,” I called. I looked over my shoulder at my family and gave them a wave and a smile.

Instead of responding as he usually did, by trotting up to the fence when I called him, Tsavo stayed at the far end of his yard. Even at that early stage in my career working with lions, I had set some rules for myself when dealing with predators. My rule with Tsavo was that if he didn't come when I called, then I would not enter the enclosure with him. I'd know from his reluctance that he preferred to be left alone.

But my whole family was there, watching and waiting expectantly. I could hardly walk back to the truck and say, “Sorry folks, the show's over.” It would have been an anticlimax after my antics with Tau and Napoleon.

“Come, Tsavie.”

I felt some unspoken pressure. It was the same when other visitors came to the Lion Park. At that time I wanted to please people, and to show them the relationship I had begun to develop with the lions, and to teach people more about these majestic animals. There were some days when I even felt uncomfortable in front of other people with my close friends Tau and Napoleon, as if the lions were acting differently, as well, because there was an audience present. However, each time I got away with the show without incident.

“Tsavie, Tsavie, Tsavie, come, boy!”

I looked back again and saw the family all still looking at me expectantly. This was going to be the finale of the tour—me with the big male lion. I went through the first fence to the second, then
opened the gate and took a bold step inside, even though I was feeling uncomfortable and awkward.

Tsavo stayed at the far end of the enclosure, staring at me. I walked towards him, but stayed close to the fence line. When I was halfway between the gate and the lion, I called him again, in a sterner voice than before. “Tsavo! Come, boy.”

His ears went back. The skin on his face went taut as he snarled. He puffed his body up, in the way lions do when they mean business. It was as if he was standing on his tiptoes, trying to make himself look even bigger and grander than he truly was. Then he charged.

Tsavo came at me at such a pace that I wouldn't have had a chance of getting out of the enclosure if I'd run. I just had to stand there and wait for whatever came. My family, I later learned, thought that this was all part of the gig. “Wow, this is so cool,” one of the kids on the truck said.

Tsavo stopped a couple of paces from me, raising a cloud of dust and loose grass. He reared up on his hind legs and at that point he stood about seven feet high. I'm not a particularly tall guy and Tsavo dwarfed me as he blocked out my view of the sky. When he swiped at me with his huge calloused paw, he was striking downwards, at my face.

In my troubled teen years I was a bit of a fighter, but that blow from Tsavo was harder than the hardest smack I've ever had in my life. Such was the size of the paw and the weight behind it; the swipe felt like three fists hitting me at once. When he connected, the blood exploded from my nose, spraying all over my shoulder and shirt. The driving force of the hit pushed me backwards, but the fence behind me stopped me from falling.

I don't really remember what happened next—whether he dragged me or I rolled away from what I knew was coming—but we ended up in the middle of the enclosure with me on my back and Tsavo straddling me.

“I think Kevin might be in trouble,” my sister Corrine said to my brother-in-law Trevor, on board the truck.

“No, Kev's fine. He knows what he's doing,” said Trevor, who later told me he hadn't seen the blood pouring from my face at that point. They thought it was still play time, but this was something I hadn't encountered before, the full fury and strength of an angry male lion.

Tsavo started biting me. He sank his canines into my leg, and when he raised his head for the next strike I reached up and used my fingers to push the skin of his cheek between his teeth so he couldn't bite down again without cutting into himself. I'd never heard of this being done—it was instinctive—but what do you do when a lion is trying to eat you? Anything you can think of.

He weighed so much that I couldn't move, and for a while it was like Tom and Jerry—a cat playing with a mouse. If the mouse moves, the cat strikes, but if the mouse stays still the cat loses interest temporarily. However, even though I kept rigid, Tsavo became restless and attacked me again. He bit me on the leg, calf, and shoulder, but each time he released his hold on me as soon as I pushed the skin of his cheek into his mouth again.

Tsavo's canine teeth were so wide apart that when he grabbed my upper arm the teeth grazed down either side of the muscle. My leg, however, was a bigger target, and the sharp points tore through my trousers and drove into the skin once more.

I was lying bleeding in the dust and my relatives were now climbing down out of the caged truck, running to the fence and screaming. My family knew this was no longer part of any show, and Uncle Kevin was most likely dying in there. It seemed like an eternity that Tsavo had been standing over me, but it may have only been seconds.

The lion lowered his massive, shaggy head to my groin and hooked one of his curved, yellowed teeth under the stout leather belt on my trousers. As he lifted me clear off the ground, my back arched and I thought, “Oh shit! Here we go . . .”

ONE
 
The Bird Man of Orange Grove

 

 

 

I spent my childhood in stitches—the kind the doctor sews into your skin, not the ones you get from rolling around on the floor in laughter. My mom used to say that I was on a collision course with life. She was a smart one, my mom. There was always a certain wildness in me, that I know. When I look back on my early life, it's easy for me now to see the brave lion, the giggling hyena, and the rogue elephant in the things I did then.

I loved the outdoors, but when I was growing up my piece of Africa was limited to a few blocks in the white middle-class suburb of Orange Grove in the north of Johannesburg. I grew up during the time of apartheid among neatly ordered rows of houses, straight streets, backyard gardens, barking dogs, and meowing cats, not rolling savannahs populated by herds of wildebeest, trumpeting elephants, and stalking lions. It was the suburbs, but it could be just as dangerous as the bush.

My mom was always getting calls from school telling her that I'd been hurt, or else I would simply show up at home, bleeding. I was
never one to do anything half-hearted, so if I was going to cut myself I would come close to losing an entire limb. I would fall through glass coffee tables, off bicycles, and out of trees, and generally do all the things mothers like to cry about.

“We had better buy this little Kevin a sewing machine so he can sew himself up, hey, Patricia?” the doctor said to my mom once. The doctor and I saw so much of each other we were like buddies. I laughed, then winced, as the dreaded needle punctured skin again and again and again.