Part of the Pride (25 page)

They paused and seemed wary, their inquisitive stares saying to me, “Kev, why are you holding those two sticks, dude? You never use sticks with us.”

They closed the gap between us and I greeted them. “Hello, my boys.” I put down the crutches and they relaxed. I took a deep breath, tried to ignore the pain, and started limping away from Tau
and Napoleon on my moon boot. If the so-called experts were right then this would be the moment my relationship with my lions changed—for the rest of my short life.

They followed me. When I stopped, both of them, first Napoleon and then Tau, lowered their massive heads to inspect the moon boot. They started sniffing and curling their top lips up over their teeth in the way lions do when they are trying to scent new smells. I think they were intrigued by the hospital odor still on the moon boot, but what was encouraging was that they clearly didn't see me as a different person, and certainly not as prey. Fortunately, too, they didn't take a bite of my boot and let the air out of my filming career for good.

My lions had accepted me, but the problem was I still had to work for the next month on my moon boot.

“I don't care about the money, we'll cancel the shoot,” Rodney Fuhr said to me after I explained what had happened.

“You can't just cancel a feature film, Rod,” I said to him.

The next hurdle was explaining to the French production company what had happened. When I told them, they couldn't believe it, and I'm sure they thought I was a complete bloody idiot. I felt like I had screwed up a huge opportunity for Rodney and the Lion Park, so I told them I would be fine.

Working with lions is hard physical work at the best of times for someone in good shape, and this shoot was going to involve me doing a lot of running and jumping, leading the lions with a piece of meat to make them do what the crew wanted. I convinced Rodney and the French team that everything would be fine. On the first day I was cautious, using my crutches, and the lions performed like the stars they were. By the second day I had ditched the sticks and I was hopping around doing a kind of two-step to try and favor my injured ankle. By the end of each day of filming I was tired and sore, but my ankle held up and my lions didn't eat me.

Even though they had to work hard, Tau and Napoleon did me
proud and performed even better than I had dared dream. The days were long, starting before dawn and continuing till after dusk, and I was able to spend a lot of time with my lions, which was great. We would laze about and sleep together in the hot hours of the day, giving them time to digest the meat I had been feeding them as rewards for their performances. Tau and Napoleon must have eaten about seventeen dead horses between them during those four weeks, and by the end of shooting they were so full they were refusing to take the treats. However, they kept on working even without their rewards, and I felt they were doing what I wanted, not only just for me, but because they wanted to, which was fantastic.

Big Boy was quite an easy lion to work with, considering he was wild, but he had a temper and I had seen him go crazy in the past. He hadn't had close human contact all his life, and he could be a ferocious beast when he wanted to be.

The French film crew wanted a scene of a lion being aggressive towards an African warrior and I thought Big Boy would fit the bill. We weren't going to have an actor in the shot, for obvious safety reasons, so the plan was to film Big Boy against a blue screen and then add in the footage of the warrior actor later. The screen was set up in one of the spare enclosures at the Lion Park.

I parked a cage next to Big Boy's night pen in Camp Three, where he was living at the time, and he moved into it without any problems. Next, we loaded him onto the vehicle for his trip to the set for a dress rehearsal, and so far everything was going well. Big Boy was growling nicely and when I opened the door and coaxed him into the filming enclosure, he went ballistic. The cameras weren't rolling, but the director and crew were there, safely on the other side of the bars as Big Boy roared and growled and swiped at the slightest sign of movement. This was our ferocious lion at his best.

“Is that what you were looking for?” I asked the director.

“
C'est magnifique
! This lion, he is the champion. This is beautiful—exactly what we want. Tomorrow, we come with the cameras and we film this scene.”

Big Boy slept outside the set in a big cage adjacent to the filming enclosure, and the next morning we brought in the crew. Having seen Big Boy in action, everyone was paranoid about safety. No one not directly involved in filming was allowed within fifty meters of Big Boy, who had already gained a reputation as the meanest beast around.

“Okay, we are ready,” said the director. “Release the lion.”

I opened the cage door and Big Boy came striding out into the filming enclosure. He turned and fixed the camera crew with his golden eyes, no doubt sending a chill of pure terror down their spines.

He paced to the corner of the set . . . and lay down. I tried everything ethically possible to get Big Boy to be the big ferocious lion he had been the day before, but he wouldn't budge. He yawned and did what lions do most of the time, slept.

In the end, we used Tau for the part of the ferocious lion, not because he was a particularly mean lion, but he did have a dislike for one particular person who worked at the park. I don't know what it was between them, but this guy couldn't go near Tau's enclosure without the lion showing his extreme displeasure. I made sure the man in question was on the blue-screen set the next day and Tau acted like he wanted to kill him, which the director loved.

A guy by the name of Mike Rosenberg, who had run Partridge Films, a UK company specializing in documentaries, came to the Lion Park one day. He was a friend of Rodney Fuhr's and I was asked to show him around. Mike saw me doing my thing with the animals. He was amazed.

“I've seen lion tamers in circuses, and animal wranglers interacting
with animals, but nothing like what I've seen you doing,” he said to me.

“These are just my friends. I go in with them to enrich their lives and we all get something out of it.”

“But it's not just lions. I've seen you go from a lion to a spotted hyena, to a jaguar and a leopard and then a brown hyena, and you're doing the same thing with all of them. How do you do it?”

“It's easy. I have a relationship with each of them.”

He started asking people around the Lion Park: “Have any documentaries been made about this guy Kevin?” Of course, one's colleagues are always supportive and said, “No, why would anyone want to make a film about Kevin?” Thanks, guys.

The documentary he wanted to make about me would later be called
Dangerous Companions
, and we worked on that film for two years, which was a long time. These days, documentaries are shot in six months. Some of the filming was quite amateurish, and on occasions I even used a digital camcorder because that was all that I could use. For example, when I filmed Pelo's cubs in their night enclosure, it wasn't possible to take a full-sized camera and cameraman with me—the lioness would have killed the cameraman. In the end, I think the different formats and approaches are what made
Dangerous Companions
special. It wasn't the quality of the video that was important, it was the scenes people were seeing—for the first time.

Some documentaries have a shot list and a director who says, once the lighting is exactly right, “Kevin, get the lion to walk from left to right, will you? Cut!” Our documentary was more like a home movie with me walking around with my camcorder saying, “Oh, look, here we have some little cubs. Here's mom and . . . oops, here comes dad”—the 550-pound lion—“to check us out.”

People were seeing unique stuff, such as Meg running into the water and swimming for the first time. We had been filming some scenes for
Dangerous Companions
on the day I was walking with
her, and while I didn't encourage her to go swimming for the documentary, it made for a great visual because it was seen to be unique.

I always wonder if filmmakers really know what the public wants. They think that to be successful a documentary has to be perfectly lit, well stage-managed, and expertly filmed. While all of that is important, I think that people want to be entertained, to see new content, and to feel like they're part of the story. All the fan mail I received from
Dangerous Companions
was about the relationships I had with the various animals, not the type of digital videotape we were using. While I appreciate how wonderful the film looks, the mail I was getting suggested that people were amazed at the bonds between me and my friends at the Lion Park. I wonder if someday both the look and the content of a documentary can be melded so that one can present astonishing footage that's also beautifully photographed.

Around about the time we were making
Dangerous Companions
, I was approached by a producer from Natural History New Zealand, an organization which had been funding a series of documentaries about the formative years of various animals, all entitled
Growing Up
.

They wanted to make a
Growing Up Hyena
documentary and had found out about the Lion Park and the work we were doing raising hyena cubs and forming our hyena clans. I was excited about getting involved, as I've always felt that hyenas have never received the recognition they deserve as fascinating, intelligent animals. Hollywood, documentary-makers, and even Disney have tended to portray hyenas as sinister scavengers, feeding off the efforts of other animals and stealing from them. In reality, hyenas are efficient hunters who live in highly organized and structured clans, as I'd learned firsthand.

I've also found that some people think they will hate being around
hyenas or getting close to one, but when they are introduced to them in the right way they fall in love with them immediately. I've seen volunteers come to the park who are itching to start working with lions, yet after their first introduction to the hyenas they come away wishing they could spend more time with them instead. It's the same when you are forced to confront any prejudice, preconception, or phobia you may have head-on. Mandy, for example, always considered herself a cat person until she moved in with me and we acquired two dogs, Valentino and Dakota, and now she loves them to bits, especially the Staffie, Valentino.

In contrast to the way we were filming
Dangerous Companions
, the director and crew of
Growing Up Hyena
arrived with a plan and a shot list. They wanted to capture the life of a hyena cub at various key points of its life and I had the perfect animal for their story. Homer was one of two cubs that Uno, our supremely dominant wild hyena, had just given birth to. Homer had a sister, Marge, and in the way that Mother Nature ordains, Marge started picking on Homer as soon as the pair of them was born. In her bid to assert her dominance as the firstborn female cub of the leader of the clan, Marge was determined to ensure that Homer lived as short a life as possible. She would bite and scratch him and do her best to ensure that her brother did not get his fair share of Uno's milk.

I knew that if I didn't rescue little Homer—his sister was already outgrowing him—he would die. I thought that I could hand-raise him and then, when he was big and strong enough, introduce him back into his clan where hopefully he would be accepted.

There was something about Homer that touched me in a way that few other animals have. I have special relationships with Tau, Napoleon, Meg, Ami, and many others, and I knew from the moment I first picked him up that Homer and I would be great mates. When the director, who flew from New Zealand, and the local film crew arrived and started work on
Growing Up Hyena
, they too soon sensed that Homer would be a star.

Homer was a loveable but odd little guy, and for a while I thought he would go down in history as the world's first vegetarian hyena. He was bottle-fed, but when it came time to wean him onto meat he wasn't interested. Try as I might I couldn't get Homer interested in flesh. I would place succulent cuts and bowls of different meats in front of him, but Homer would turn up his nose. He kept feeding from the bottle, but like the overindulged spoiled child he was, he didn't want to give up the milk. My mom told me that I had the same problem as a kid and stayed on the bottle far longer than most kids did at the time.

In desperation I decided to make a game out of feeding. Homer liked to chase things, so one day I bundled my mountain bike and Homer into my vehicle—like Trelli, he loved riding in cars—and drove out to the airstrip at the park. Also in the back of my truck was a leg from a dead cow which had been donated to the park. I took a length of rope and tied the leg to the back of my bike and got on.

“Come, Homer!” I called, as I got on the bike and started peddling. It was hard work, but Homer immediately wanted to play. As I pedaled furiously, the leg of meat raising a mini dust cloud in my wake, Homer the hyena bounded happily after the foreign object. Up and down we went, with me getting increasingly exhausted, but Homer becoming more and more interested in the dust-encrusted lump I was dragging through the dust and grass. At some point a switch tripped in Homer's little brain, and when he pounced on the cow's leg that time he sunk his teeth into it and started eating. He was happy, I was happy, and finally I was able to stop pedaling.

As Homer started to feed and put on weight, I began the experimental process of introducing him to his old clan. His sister Marge was already much bigger than Homer, loving her position as the matriarch's daughter. When I first drove him into their enclosure, she eyed Homer warily. Little did I know that this was a sign of things to come.