Part of the Pride (23 page)

Maditau stopped half a meter from me. She was huffing and puffing and staring at me, while I stayed there, rooted to the spot. She looked back at the fracas she had left behind her and to the injured cub she had dropped. Maditau wanted to regain possession of the cub so she turned and ran back to it. But she wasn't finished with me.

Three more times she left the pack and the cub to charge me, over and over again. After the second charge I picked up a rock and threw it at her. It bounced off her harmlessly, but seemed to make her even angrier, so I realized that probably wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made. With each successive mock attack she seemed to get more aggressive. I knew that if I took a step backwards from the spot where my feet remained planted, or if I ran, she would come for me again.

I thought if she charged a fifth time, this book might end up being called
Part of the Pride—in Memoriam of Kevin Richardson
.

Maditau returned to the others and the stricken cub and I sat down. We eyed each other off in a tense standoff for a few minutes, though it seemed like an hour at the time. She backed down, but when she left the other lions, she took the mangled, screaming cub in her jaws and ran off into the bush.

“Screw this,” I thought. I wasn't going to let her get away with killing one of her nephews or nieces, and showing her own kids how
to torture a cub in the process. I ran to the gate, opened it, and got into the Land Cruiser. I turned the key and rammed the truck into gear and drove it back into the lions' enclosure.

“Maditau! Maditau!” I roared, my arm out of the driver's side window and banging on the Cruiser's door as I drove slowly over the rocky ground in search of the recalcitrant lioness.

I found her eventually at the top end of the enclosure, with the cub still in her jaws. When she saw me, she dropped the cub. I thought that when she saw me in the vehicle she would realize that it was “game over.” I was wrong. It was game on. She charged the Land Cruiser, and for a moment I thought she was going to come crashing through the driver's side window, which was open.

The Prado has electric windows, and I was stabbing the button with all my might trying to get the damned motor to move faster. She wanted to kill me, but like before, she still wanted to continually regain possession of the injured cub. She raced back to the cub then decided to come and charge me again.

When she came at me, I saw my chance to outmaneuver her. I drove around her and straight at the cub. It was so tiny that I was able to drive over the top of it—the wheels on either side of it—so that for a moment the four-by-four was providing the little one with an umbrella of steel.

Unable to reach the cub, Maditau stormed off and started running around the enclosure. Frustrated at losing the cub, she took her anger out on one of her older daughters, sinking her teeth into the other lion's backside with a sound that made me wince.

By now, Tau and Napoleon had caught on to the madness that was unfolding in their enclosure. The two males ran to Maditau and one of them—I can't remember which—gave her a beating. Thankfully, during that commotion I was able to get out of the car and pick up the cub.

As I drove toward the gate, Maditau escaped her dressing-down from the males and followed me. She circled me for a while, not
letting me out of the vehicle to open the gate, but mercifully she eventually moved off.

My heart was racing, but inside the Toyota with me was a torn and shredded cub at death's door, with severe lacerations and puncture marks on its throat and side. Strange as it might sound, I knew from experience that taking such a young cub away from its mother to the vet was probably the worst thing I could do for it right then. It was a feisty little thing and having survived so much torture, I thought it might pull through if I gave it some emergency first aid and then returned it to the care of its mother, sooner rather than later.

I carry an extensive first aid kit in the car. I pulled out antiseptic cream and a special type of powder we use which slows bleeding. I ran my fingers over the squealing cub, parting its fur to check its wounds in more detail. Where the others had bitten into the cub, they had punctured two layers of its stomach muscles, so that only a thin membrane of skin was stopping its internal organs from falling out. If they had managed to disembowel it, the cub would have died. It needed stitching, but I still believed that it would be better for me to hand the cub straight back to Tabby and have her care for it and feed it overnight. I would take it to the vet the next day, once the commotion in the enclosure had finally subsided. I returned it to Tabby, and while she received it graciously, once the cub was safe Tabby turned on me and threatened to eat me. She must have thought I was the one who had taken it from her in the first place! I couldn't win.

I got home to Mandy shaken, and I was a very worried man. Not only did I think that I had just wrecked my nine-and-a-half-year relationship with Maditau, I was also worried about how it would affect my bonds with Tau and Napoleon, as we had all been getting on so well together as a family. I started cutting myself up mentally. I should have let Maditau kill the cub, I thought. Why had I intervened? No way, I countered myself. I couldn't have lived with myself if I had stood there and watched Maditau kill Tabby's cub.

Of course, nothing like this ever happens without complications: ABC News from the United States was coming to film me with the lions two days later, on Tuesday. The ABC anchor was fascinated with the way I had integrated myself into the pride and how the lionesses allowed me free access to their cubs. Great. Here was the problem: now one of those mother lions wanted to kill me! On Monday we had to record the audio dub for the actors' voices for
White Lion
. We also had to take the cub to the vet. And there was that final thing on my mind: the looming prospect of my death being recorded by ABC Prime Time the next day.

Monday evening I went back to the enclosure and I was, quite frankly, shitting myself. I opened the gate and went in. Maditau didn't charge me, but she wasn't particularly charmed to see me. She glared at me and flared her lip. I went on, talking to the other lions and interacting with them like nothing had happened. Tau and Napoleon rubbed heads with me in the traditional form of lion greeting, and Maditau's cubs came up to me to say hello, as well. While Maditau remained surly, she didn't eat me, which was about the only good thing I had to report to Mandy.

I was still fretting when the television crew from ABC arrived on Tuesday. I considered calling off the shoot right up to the last minute, but when we got to the lions I saw Tau and Napoleon were away from Maditau. The little cub was back from the vet and was doing well; we were able to present him to Tabby with no aggression on her part, which the TV guys loved. However, the crew really wanted to see me interacting with the males, so I went in to Tau and Napoleon's enclosure and they greeted me. Maditau kept her distance, which was just fine by me.

I went up to Tau and he was fine. Next, some of the cubs came to join us and soon we all moved to where Napoleon was. We all sat down in the grass and it was great. The TV crew had three cameras,
and they were loving the vision they were getting of the whole pride together—or so it seemed. Maditau was still off by herself.

Right then, an amazing thing happened. Maditau decided she didn't want to be on her own anymore, so she came straight over to me, singling me out from the rest of the pride, and gave me the most friendly head rub I can recall receiving from her in many years, right in front of the cameras. I was lying down at the time, very vulnerable, and after she finished rubbing me, she plonked herself down between Tau and me. So there we were, all of us lazing there in grass in the shade of a tree, one big pride once more.

Humans are so used to wronging other people that we try to project these failings of ours onto lions and other animals. When you wrong another human, the victim can end up holding a grudge against you and we think the same thing is true with animals. Maybe Maditau did want to kill me because I intervened over the cub, but she didn't do it. Maybe she was just having a bad day. I was so worried that she was holding a grudge against me, yet she was able to lose the baggage and get back to normal quicker than I was. It's what I really love about lions, this ability to forgive and forget so quickly.

Sometimes I go to bed at night and wonder if I am getting too cocky. Am I thinking that I can conquer the world? Do I think I can go to America and tame rattlesnakes for another documentary? It's at times like this that I take a deep breath and try and appreciate what I already have and what I've achieved, and simply to be thankful for the day I've just spent.

Every once in a while—sometimes it's every two weeks, and at others it's every couple of months—I get an overwhelmingly emotional feeling and start talking like a bit of a blithering idiot.

We'll be in bed and I'll say to Mandy, “Do you know how lucky I am?”

“You've told me, Kev,” Mandy will say. She is also a great leveler.

“No, you don't understand how amazing it is for me to be accepted by these lions. They're incredible. You're incredible. I can't believe how lucky I am.”

“Yes, Kev.”

I'm conscious of the fact that it's human nature to only fully appreciate what you've had when it's gone. I make a point of realizing how privileged I am, because I like to appreciate what I have. I make an effort not to take what I have for granted and I try to humble myself. The fact is, it is easy for a human being to go beyond himself and think that everything he does is special.

What is special, in my case, is that my wife and my animals have let me into their lives.

When Meg and Ami come to greet me they run at me like they're trying to take down a zebra.

They were boisterous as cubs when I was hand-raising them, and now, as lionesses weighing in at nearly four hundred pounds each, they can knock me to the ground when we play. It freaks Mandy out. She is far more concerned about me playing with the lionesses than with old Tau and Napoleon, who are past the age of jumping on my back and knocking me to the ground. Mandy is not jealous of Meg and Ami at all, but she is worried about how rough we all play together. To me, however, Meg and Ami are the most gentle lions I know, in terms of their characters, if not their strength. Fortunately, too, Mandy only comes to see the lions a couple of times a week, so she doesn't get to see everything that goes on when I play with the lions on a day-to-day basis.

When I was raising them, and Tau and Napoleon, people would always tell me that at some point I would have to stop letting the lions jump all over me. The thinking was that when a lion reached
a certain age, it would decide to kill me rather than just play with me. I thought this was nonsense. Sure, I learned the hard way to be wary around some lions in their teenage years—between two and three years—but the lions I hand-raised have never wanted to kill me. When Meg and Ami reached about two years old, they became too heavy for me to piggyback around their enclosure. They still wanted to jump on me, only now when they did so they would push me to the ground. Having reached that level of maturity did not mean they would kill me once they could knock me down.

The only danger I face with Meg and Ami is being squashed to death, and in fact that has almost happened to me. One day the girls and I were lazing about, and first one then the other decided to lie casually across my body. I couldn't move, and every time I breathed out their combined weight compressed my chest a little more. I couldn't draw a breath as Meg and Ami were crushing my lungs. I wasn't strong enough to lift them. Plenty of people have predicted I would be killed by my lions, but not like this! I was panicking, laughing and crying from the ridiculousness of it all at once. Fortunately, they shifted just in time.

Occasionally when we are lying around, one of them will accidentally punch me in the face with a huge paw when she is trying to get up again. I do suffer cuts and bruises and scratches, but it's all part of the play. These girls are special lions and special friends of mine, and I am as intimate with them as a human can be with a lion.

There is a difference, I think, in how I am perceived by the different lions in my family. Tau and Napoleon treat me as an adopted brother, but they know I am not a lion, so something in them makes them hold back a little when we play. I jumped on their backs once to see how they would handle it. They left me there for a while then shook me off.

Meg and Ami think I am another lion, and that's the way they play with me—rough. From an early age I used to carry the two sisters on my back and people thought I was crazy, piggybacking
lions. Now if I jump on their backs, they jump on mine—and flatten me. They hold nothing back with me, but just as when I had Meg clinging to my back when she swam with me, she knows not to claw me, because that wouldn't be play.

If I pushed the boundaries of relating to lions with Tau and Napoleon, then I broke every single rule relating to what one can and cannot do with a lion with Meg and Ami. I imprinted myself on them from the day of their birth, when I saved them from drowning by Maditau.