Part of the Pride (27 page)

On the third night I brushed against the canvas wall of the tent and heard a rustling noise, followed by a low, guttural, almost ghostly noise: “
Hoaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr
.” Odd sound, I thought, so I deliberately hit the wall again. Up beside me reared a fully grown black cobra. This snake was probably one-and-a-half times my size, and as I don't have any snake-wrangling experience, I beat it out of that tent in quick time.

It's interesting how man and nature can live side by side in harmony until something disturbs the balance. That snake had probably made its home in the tent for some time and had been quite happy to tolerate me for two nights until I bumped the canvas. If I hadn't disturbed or alarmed him, we might never have confronted each other.

I like to look after my machines and I keep all of my cars, my Triumph motorcycle, and a 1957 Series I Land Rover I own in pristine condition.

Rodney's 182 was being kept at Lanseria Airport, and while that is not far from where I live, I wanted to move the aircraft to the Lion Park's airstrip so that I could better care for the aircraft.

The park's airstrip is only four hundred and fifty meters long, which is not huge. At the time I was a relatively novice pilot, but I read the spec sheets for the Cessna and found that it could be landed on an airstrip the length of ours, though there was a note that said only experienced pilots should attempt landing on strips less than a certain length. I had about a hundred hours at the time and I was bold enough to consider myself experienced enough.

I'm not a recluse, but I love flying by myself and having time to
myself. The only person I have to talk to in the air is the air traffic controller, and for the rest of the time I can think and just enjoy the freedom of being airborne and as free as a bird. As well as the 182, I fly a Thunderbird fixed-wing microlight, and a Zenair Sky Jeep. We use the aircraft at the research camps and to keep an eye on our game at the Kingdom. Recreationally, I catch up for breakfast with a bunch of other pilots at different airstrips from time to time.

When I took off from Lanseria it was a very short hop across to the Lion Park. As I brought her down it didn't feel right. The airstrip seemed to rush up at me and it looked impossibly short. The aircraft seemed to have a mind of its own and it didn't want to come down there. I finally touched the grass, but the aircraft bounced, then bounced again. I was nervous, and some power lines that run through the bush at the far end of the strip seemed to be rushing towards me too fast. I decided to go around, so I pushed the throttle to full power to take off again.

I could feel the speed building, but the electricity cables still seemed to be hurtling towards me rather than the other way around. I pulled back on the stick to try and coax the aircraft up, but I was sacrificing airspeed for altitude. I crossed the power lines by the skin of my teeth, but in doing so stalled the aircraft. The Cessna smacked down on the far side of a road which runs the other side of the cables, onto open ground. By this stage I had lost control completely.

There was a jarring thud as the nose wheel hit the ground and bent forwards, causing it to brush the propeller. The tail bashed into the dirt and she bounced again. The ground started to fall away below me. Amazingly, the jolt allowed the Cessna to gain enough speed and height to unstall the wings and start flying again.

I managed to regain control of the aircraft and my pounding heart and flew around in a low circle. I didn't know the extent of the damage to the plane, although many of the instruments had fallen out of the cockpit control panel. I pushed them back in as
best as I could and found, miraculously, that the radio was still working.

I looked out of my side window and saw that part of the rear tail of the plane was flapping around in the slipstream. I was shitting bricks by this time and wondered when the plane would start to break up. When I looked out the other side window I noticed the tip of the wing was missing. I didn't even know if I still had a nose wheel.

As a trainee pilot you are taught two distress calls you can make to declare an emergency. It you are in dire straits and about to crash you call, “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” If, however, you need to make an emergency landing you call, “Pan, pan . . . pan, pan . . . pan, pan.”

What should I say, I thought to myself as the aircraft shuddered around me. Do I call pan pan or do I call mayday mayday? As well as stressing about my predicament I was also trying to think through all of the implications if I made the wrong call over the radio!

I took a deep breath and keyed the radio. “Lanseria, this is Foxtrot Uniform Golf.”

“Foxtrot Uniform Golf, this is Lanseria, go ahead,” replied the air traffic controller in a calm voice.

“Um . . . Lanseria, this is Foxtrot Uniform Golf . . . pan, pan, pan . . . I mean, mayday mayday . . . Actually, I have an emergency!”

I babbled on for a bit longer, explaining that I'd balked a landing at the Lion Park. The park is in Lanseria's airspace and I should have reported to them by now that I was safe on the ground. I told them I didn't think I had a tail left on my airplane. I was a nervous, gibbering wreck.

The controller was very calm, and I'm sure he knew that my tail hadn't fallen off—especially as I was still flying.

“Foxtrot Uniform Golf, you are cleared to land two-four right.” They had given me the long runway at Lanseria. “Foxtrot Uniform Golf, are you declaring an emergency?”

“Um, yes, I mean . . . like, yes, I am.” They were so calm and I'd forgotten all my procedures for communicating over the radio. I just wanted to get on the ground. Through my headphones I could hear the controllers diverting all the other air traffic, from small private planes to commercial jets, away from the area while they allowed this idiot—me—to land his plane.

I could have flown past the tower and asked them to check if I still had a nose wheel, or simply put the aircraft down. Without a wheel the prop would hit the runway, curl up, and destroy the engine. I made the decision that with other bits flapping away there was no time for a flypast.

I tightened my safety harness, coaxed the wounded Cessna down, and, as it happened, made one of the best landings of my life. I braced myself as she touched and the nose came down, expecting to hear the agonized shriek of the propeller blades connecting with tarmac.

But I was safe, and the prop was still spinning as I followed the special taxi route off the runway that the controllers had arranged for me. I climbed down out of the aircraft and I started shaking. Taking an unsteady walk around the aircraft, I saw the full extent of the damage for the first time. The nose wheel assembly had been pushed forward into the firewall when I'd first hit the ground, lowering the clearance to the extent that the tips of the propeller's blades had been spinning less than half an inch from the surface of the runway.

I have been in bike crashes, rolled my sister's car, been bitten by hyenas, and mauled by Tsavo the lion, but for the first time in my life I really thought I had been about to die. I learned a lot about pushing boundaries, trusting one's instincts, and the toughness of the Cessna 182 that day.

THIRTEEN
 
White Lion

 

 

 

Ian and I had just finished our morning coffee when the phone rang. We were about to leave the Lion Park to look at some white lions that we hoped would be suitable for a new feature film we were about to embark on.

“Mister Kevin, come quickly. Sly has got in with the others and he is killing them!” It was a breathless Sam, one of the park's African camp staff.

“Who's he killing, Sam? Where?”

“I don't know. You must come quick!”

“Shit.” Ian and I piled into the
bakkie
and I tore through the park, ignoring all the animals I normally would have stopped and chatted to. When we arrived at the enclosure where we kept our white lions, we were greeted by a scene of gory havoc. Lying motionless in the grass was a white lion, his beautiful coat stained red.

Sly, a big, wild brown lion, had somehow escaped from his own enclosure and got into the yard where we kept Graham, our sixteen-month-old white lion, and some young lionesses. Sly had always had a bad temperament. I had never formed a relationship with
him and didn't even consider him an acquaintance lion. Here was the prime example of a grown male who was in the process of taking over a pride. However, not content with just killing the young upcoming pride male, Graham, Sly now had his massive jaws around the head of one of the lionesses. Others had joined me at the fence to see what all the commotion was about. I fumbled for my keys and unlocked the padlock.

“Kevin, what do you think you're doing?” Ian asked. I didn't stop to answer him. I slid open the gate and ran in, reaching for the pepper spray in the holster on my belt. Sly was growling as he chomped down on the lioness's head and she thrashed in vain against his merciless strength.

Graham, whose body I passed, had been a magnificent white lion, and aside from being a marvelous animal, he was going to be one of the stars of our new feature film,
White Lion
. I wasn't thinking about money or filming schedules, though, when I saw him lying there. I was simply in a state of rage. What made things worse was that I had named Graham after my brother-in-law's late brother, who died of cancer. Graham was born very shortly after his namesake died, so I told my brother-in-law that I had christened the cub so his name could live on. He was quite touched and it enraged me that this lion was now dead.

This bastard Sly had killed my mate, and now he was trying to murder one of my girls. I raced up to him and squirted the spray into the face of this fully grown predator. The pepper spray was enough to make Sly gasp—that was all—but it gave the lioness a chance to shake herself free. She had puncture marks on the back of her head and neck, and the enormous pressure of Sly's jaws had caused one of her eyeballs to pop. Bloodied and in pain, she slunk away.

“Get back! Get out of there, Kevin, you're bloody mad!” Ian was shouting at me from outside the fence.

Blinded by rage, I hadn't thought twice about running into an
enclosure to take on a lion in the midst of a killing frenzy. I paused, and in that brief quiet second, I thought, “Uh . . . maybe Ian has a point here.” I'd found myself in a bad situation.

Sly shook his head and snorted to clear the stinging residue of the pepper spray. As a defensive weapon it had saved the researcher from Rain's fury, and it had given this lioness a chance to get away. I doubted it would stop Sly from finishing me off, though.

He looked at me. He didn't know what I had done or why I had done it. I was asking myself the same question at the time. The gate slid open and a
bakkie
roared into the enclosure. The arrival of the vehicle diffused the situation, and we allowed all of the young lions to run out into the “no-man's-land” passage that runs between the various enclosures. This corridor is still gated at each end, so there was no risk of the lions escaping the park. We locked Sly in Graham's enclosure until a vet could come and dart him and treat the injured lioness.

Rodney Fuhr thought I had acted carelessly, to put it mildly. “It was just a lion, Kevin,” he said. He was right, but I'd seen Graham's body, and the lioness being crushed to death between those huge canines. I'd seen the other lionesses huddled, traumatized, at the far end of the yard and I'd become enraged. “You are not going to murder her,” I had thought to myself. This was personal. Sly was on a killing spree and would have finished off all of the animals if no one had intervened.

People do strange things under stress and, believe me, having someone hand you the equivalent of several million dollars and say, “Here, Kev, go and make me a movie,” is a stressful experience. That's basically what happened to me.

Rodney has for a long time wanted to make a feature film about a white lion who gets kicked out of his pride, meets some other animals, and has some adventures. The young lion grows up alone, but
eventually takes over a pride of his own after narrowly escaping a trophy hunter's bullet. In the beginning we thought we would cruise around with our cameras filming a lion walking around and being put in a few different situations; in the end we would put it all together and have ourselves a feature film. It was the same plan we had initially when filming
Dangerous Companions
. What we soon learned, of course, was that making a full-length feature film was much more complicated than shooting a documentary.

We put a team of guys together, some of whom I'd met on film shoots where I had supplied lions, who I knew were used to working around animals, and who were good at their jobs.

I think everyone who talked to me in those early years thought, “What's this lion wrangler up to, trying to put together a multimillion-dollar feature film?” Some people in the industry laughed me off or didn't even bother calling me back. Every time someone rejected me or came up with a reason why I couldn't make a film, it made me more determined, even though I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I learned fast.