Part of the Pride (30 page)

“Let's try again on the Polaris,” I said to Rodney. We hopped in the four-wheel all-terrain vehicle to try the search again. I was hoping that the noise of the engine might make him stick his head up, or stand, in case we had somehow missed him while he was hiding under a thick bush. “Here boy! Letsatsi!” we cried as I drove the vehicle over the uneven ground.

“
Wa-OWWW
,” came a high-pitched, squeaky noise from off to our right.

I pulled on the brakes, cut the engine, and cocked my head.

“What is it?” Rodney asked.

“Shush. Listen, Rod.” I held my hand up and waited for the noise again.

“
Wa-OWWW
,” something squealed again.

“Wa-OWWW?” I parroted. “That sounds like a bloody lion cub. Did you hear that?”

Rodney turned to look in the direction I was pointing, concentration plain on his face. “No, no, no, Kev. There are no cubs here.”

Rodney is part deaf at the best of times. I knew what I had heard. “Listen, man.”

“
Wa-OWWW
.”

“There it is again! You must have heard it that time.”

Rodney's eyes widened. “Yes, I heard it that time. What is that? That's not Letsatsi.”

“Shit,” I said. We got off the Polaris nervously, because now we were wondering if there was a lioness in there with cubs.

Rodney and I recounted the events of the previous Friday in
whispers as we walked. We had counted Jamu, Mogli, and the four lionesses into the truck. It was only six lions, so it wasn't like we could have missed one.

“
Wa-OWWW. Wa-OWWW
.”

Rodney and I paced quickly towards the sound, which was getting louder. I grabbed a fistful of thorn bush and pulled it aside. There in the grass were two tiny little lion cubs, alive but badly dehydrated, still stumbling about, squawking for their mother. Lion cubs are blind for about the first week of their lives and particularly vulnerable.

“Ice?” Rodney said, reading my mind as realization dawned on his face.

“Bloody hell,” I said. We knew Ice, one of Jamu and Mogli's lionesses, was pregnant and due to give birth, but she had still looked pregnant when we had loaded her on to the truck three days previously. I remembered her bounding up onto the back of the vehicle—there had been no snarling or reluctance on her part to leave the tiny cubs that she must have only just given birth to.

I felt sick to my stomach. We had moved Letsatsi—an unrelated adult male lion with a worsening attitude—into another pride's enclosure that contained newborn cubs. By all the laws of the wild and captivity, Letsatsi would have been driven by instinct to kill Ice's cubs as soon as he encountered them. Yet here were two babies that had miraculously survived a weekend caged with a killer. Was it possible that Letsatsi, who was still nowhere to be seen, had missed these two, or had Letsatsi escaped from the big enclosure? All the possibilities were too scary to consider.

“
Wa-OWWW
!” This time the cry came not from the two little weaklings that Rodney and I cupped in our hands, but from another bush, ten yards farther on.

“More of them?” Rod said.

My heart was pounding in my throat as we moved forward. This day was getting weirder by the second and Letsatsi could still be
waiting behind the next tree, preparing to ambush the humans he had grown to distrust. The bush was thick in this part of the enclosure and I brushed a sapling aside.

There was Letsatsi. He turned his big white face and looked at me, from the thicket where he had been hiding from us. I froze. One more tiny cub was nuzzling Letsatsi's snowy stomach while a fourth was plonked on its bottom, nestled between the male's two huge paws. Letsatsi opened his mouth, revealing his wickedly gleaming teeth, and rolled out his long, studded tongue. He gave the little cub a lick and looked back up at me. He gave a low, friendly greeting: “
Wuh-ooow
.”

Here he was, not killing, but protecting; playing with and caring for another pride female's cubs that had been sired by one of two unrelated brown male lions. I had thought Letsatsi was becoming a danger, but here he was treating the strange cubs like his own. Even if they had been his own, conventional wisdom had it that cubs couldn't be introduced to their father until they were eight weeks old, and Ice's babies were far younger than that.

The cubs clearly hadn't had a drop of milk since they had been born, and Letsatsi, for all his kind intentions, could not suckle them, so now Rodney and I had to get the two other cubs away from him. Incredibly, Letsatsi didn't bat an eyelid as we approached him and picked up the cubs. We left him there, loaded the cubs and ourselves into the Polaris, and drove quickly back out of the big enclosure, off to where Jamu, Mogli, Ice, and the others were now living.

Other Park employees started gathering around us, checking out the cubs and asking what had happened. If Rodney hadn't seen what I had, and been able to back me up, I doubt anyone would have believed the tale we breathlessly recounted. As humans, we have no clue how complicated and intelligent these majestic animals can be. When they kill their own kind or do something we find unspeakable, we think they are being mindlessly cruel, but there is always some unknown reason for their behavior.

“There's no way Ice will take the cubs back now,” someone said.

“She's not stupid,” I said back. Conventional wisdom was dead in this Lion Park.

Rod and I carried the cubs over to the new pen and I called to Ice. She came bounding over to us.

“Wow! Look at her vulva, Rod,” I said. We both noticed for the first time that there were blood stains on her. Mentally we both kicked ourselves for not noticing on Friday, although Ice had given us no other clues that she had left a litter of helpless cubs behind her in the big enclosure.

“
Wuh-oooh, wuh-oooh
,” Ice said when she saw her babies. I knew that call well and I smiled. It was the noise lionesses made when talking to their cubs, a different sound from all others.

Quickly, we transferred Ice to a segregated night pen away from Jamu and Mogli and the rest of the pride—I didn't want to chance anything else going wrong for these cubs—and let the tiny dehydrated youngsters in with her. Within ten minutes they were happily and greedily suckling from their mom.

Ice looked up at Rodney and me as if to say, “Thanks guys.” I can't deny that there is an unspoken language that the lions and I communicate with. Sometimes people ask me, how do you know what he or she is actually telling you? I answer back, “I just know.”

Rodney and I were like a couple of joyous new fathers. We hugged and slapped each other and laughed and danced on the spot.

FOURTEEN
 
The Show Must Go On

 

 

 

I always thought that Letsatsi was a super lion. After seeing the way he behaved with Ice's cubs, we all knew that he was not the monster that we feared we had created. However, while he had let us take the cubs back, he refused to move from under the bush where he had been denning the babies, and refused, again, all our efforts to load him onto a truck.

Ultimately, we were able to lure him with food into the big enclosure's night pen, and from there into a smaller temporary fenced yard, and eventually into a cage. We then had to lift the cage onto the truck to move him out. I didn't want to dart him, as I felt he had been through enough already. Whereas Ice had given us a look of thanks and contentment, Letsatsi's stare from the back of the truck said to Rodney Nombekana and me: “You guys are the ones who have given me so much grief in my life, and our relationship will never be the same.”

Nowadays when I drive through the camp I say hi to Letsatsi and he says hi back to me, through the car window, but that's about as far as it goes between him and me. As well as losing our relationship
with Letsatsi, Rodney and I from then on also had to give up any relationships we had enjoyed with Letsatsi's future pride females, as it wasn't worth the risk of approaching the girls that belonged to Letsatsi. He was just too protective of them around us. It was probably my confidence that had been shattered and both Letsatsi and I had responded to that realization. It was sad, but we had to move on.

But there was another problem: making
White Lion
was just starting to get me down. Both the people and the lions involved were not exactly behaving according to the plan. I had met a lot of fantastic people from the film industry, including Mike Swan, who started as our director of photography and ended up, after we lost out first two, our general director. Our focus-puller, Houston Haddon, was a great guy; but there are others I would be happy never to see again as long as I live. Apart from Mike and Houston, Rodney Nombekana and Rodney Fuhr are the only other people apart from me who have been with the film from its beginning to its end. Helga, as always, was brilliant, though she left to have and raise her first child during filming, otherwise I am sure she would have been with us all the way.

Usually when I have problems with people, lions take up the slack and rarely disappoint me, but this time, there was no such luck. Our star adult white lion, Letsatsi, was on permanent strike, and Graham, a promising understudy, had been killed by Sly in his murderous rampage. I had only one other biggish white male, a wonderful lion named Thor, who would eventually grow big enough to be used as a stand-in for some scenes as the adult Letsatsi, but we needed another full-sized white lion to replace the real Letsatsi, and we needed him quickly. Having Thor maturing in the wings would also relieve the pressure on the newcomer in the following season of filming.

Some of the other production people and I hit the phones and the Internet, literally scouring the world for a full-sized white male lion.
We spoke to people in the States, Europe, and Australia, and it looked like we might have to bring a wrangler into South Africa as no one wanted us to work their lions by ourselves. That was a fair enough point, as I wouldn't have a relationship with the new lion and didn't particularly want to strike up a new one, either. However, employing both lion and handler and shipping them from overseas was going to cost us a fortune. One American-based animal handler told us that we would not find a workable white lion, but he would dye one of his brown lions white for us! I said no thanks.

Closer to home we checked up on other white lions that we had raised at the park and subsequently sold to other operators, to see how they were doing. One of these was Snowy, who was living on a farm in the Eastern Cape where he was being used for display. We went to the farm to have a look at him, but as our luck would have it he was mating at the time. As you can imagine, when Snowy was faced with the prospect of mating with his new lioness or befriending two humans he didn't know from Adam, he took one look at Rod and me and growled. We got the message and backed away from Snowy's enclosure. I don't need to be told twice when a lion is in no mood to become a film star.

People e-mailed us pictures of their white lions but we couldn't find one that was even worth following up. Some were young males with little Mohawks, but we needed a fully grown lion with a luxuriant mane. We thought we had exhausted all our leads. We went back through our old records at the park one more time and found one we had missed—Sphinx.

Sphinx had been sold by the Lion Park to another tourist operation near the giant Sun City casino and hotel complex northwest of Johannesburg. We worked out that by now he would be the right age to act as a possible replacement for Letsatsi. Ian got on the phone to them.

I had helped raise Sphinx and remembered him as a very good lion, but I had no way of knowing if we would be able to work with
him. His new owners agreed to hire Sphinx to us and I asked Rodney to go and pick him up. As Rodney was leaving to go and get Sphinx, I said to him, “Look, Rod, if he shows the right signs—coming up to you through the fence and talking to you—then at least see if you can load him. If you can get him onto the truck, maybe we'll just bring him here, put him in the big enclosure, and try and film him through the fence.” I was so desperate to keep the project rolling I didn't want to push my luck with a lion I hadn't seen in years.

When Rodney returned with Sphinx he was excited, and his enthusiasm was contagious. I wanted to get a good close look at Sphinx myself by now.

“He was fine, Kev,” Rodney said, when I met him at the enclosure. “He recognized my voice as soon as I talked to him and he loaded with no problem.”

I didn't want to get my hopes up. Sphinx was about three-and-a-half years old, but he was a little smaller than I had expected. This, however, wasn't a major problem as it was wintertime and the grass was still dry and yellow. It would be four or five months before the rains came again and Mother Nature allowed us to pick up where we had left off filming with Letsatsi, against the lush green backdrop of an African summer. I was sure that in that time Sphinx would grow to the right size, but the important question lingered—could I even go into the enclosure with a lion I hadn't seen for many years, let alone work him?