Part of the Pride (10 page)

I don't fear much in life. I've raced superbikes, I fly, and I interact with lions for a living, but there is nothing that scares me quite so much as a hypodermic needle. I hate them like I hate nothing else
in the world. Seriously, I know I could never be a drug addict. The thought of sticking a needle in my body is the worst thing I can conjure up if I want to scare myself. I have gotten better with age, but for a guy who gets as many scrapes, cuts, and bites as I do, this is not a good phobia to have.

“Thanks for that, Doc,” I said, trying to be brave but wincing from the pain talking caused in my nose. I was assuming that he was making it sound worse than it really would be, so that when the hideous, sharpened point entered the torn flesh of my face, it wouldn't be quite as bad as I feared.

“It's going to sting like hell and hurt for at least five minutes,” the doctor said, taking the syringe in his gloved hands and pushing the plunger a little to clear the air bubble.

“I thought that maybe the nose is, like, not the most sensitive part of the body,” I snuffled through a mouthful of blood and mucous.

He smiled a little. “Kev, this is going to burn like someone has poured acid into the wound, and then it's going to feel like I've pulled your entire nose off your face.”

“Thanks, Doc.” He was right. On all counts.

Later, after I had stopped crying and the doctor had stitched my now numb nose back to my face, I answered the casualty nurse's “lion or hyena” question.

“Neither.”

I explained that I'd gone into the hyena enclosure and slid the gate closed. My hyena friends, as usual, came loping up to greet me. Hyenas love having their chins scratched, like dogs, and Bongo was first in line for the special treatment. I was sitting on the ground with him when one of the others came up behind me, out of sight. While I was talking to Bongo, the other hyena—I'm not sure which one it was—touched the side of my face with his nose. I got a fright, and as I turned my head I caught my nose on a sharp piece of steel that was protruding from the security gate. As I whipped my head around, the skin tore down to the septum.

It's a myth that tame hyenas will savage you if they scent blood. As I held one hand to my bleeding nose and staggered to my feet, Bongo was licking my free hand as if to say, “Kev, why are you leaving me, buddy? We were having such fun.”

Rodney Fuhr decided early on in my time at the Lion Park that he wanted to expand the range of animals we were keeping and turn the facility from a Lion Park into a predator park. Eventually our species tally included cheetah, caracal, jackals, wild dogs, leopards, and black leopards, and even a South American jaguar, but the first acquisition on his list was spotted hyena.

Hyenas have a bad reputation as marauding scavengers and this has been perpetuated by Hollywood, documentary makers, and even local African tradition. In parts of the continent people believe that witches ride on the backs of hyenas in the dead of night. The truth about hyenas is that they are intelligent predators who hunt as well as scavenge. They live in strictly ordered clans where the females rule supreme. The highest ranking male in a hyena clan is still subservient to the lowest ranking female. It's a little like marriage.

To be honest, I thought Rodney was a little mad, but he was the boss. None of us at the park knew very much about hyenas, but we hit the phones and eventually found a guy who was breeding spotted hyenas in captivity. He offered to sell us two cubs, for what I thought was an astronomical price. However, Rodney paid, and the baby hyenas, named Ed and Shanzi, were delivered to us.

These little guys were aggressive as hornets, and even though I hadn't been a hundred per cent convinced of Rodney's logic in buying them, I was fascinated by them. To start off, we had to try and work out what sex they were. This is not as easy as it sounds, particularly when you have never seen a hyena up close. Female hyenas
have external sex organs—that is, an organ like a penis. We were all trying to work out the difference—assuming these two hyenas were different sexes—and it was my job to tickle them in the crotch to produce a reaction. I felt like a hyena pervert. These two looked pretty similar down there and we decided they were both probably males.

Right from the start people started telling me that hyenas were not lions, and there was no way I could carry on with them in the same way I did with my buddies Tau and Napoleon.

“These are display animals, not relationship animals,” someone who probably knew even less about hyenas than I did told me. “You might be able to play with them when they're small, but after a year they'll rip you to pieces.”

As usual, I wanted to see for myself, and I got bitten to shreds by those two little animals. I was like Kev the Hyena Punching Bag and Pin Cushion. I'd go into the enclosure with Ed and Shanzi and they would wreak havoc on my ankles. My shins would be covered with bruises, and if they ever locked on to my arm it felt like they were about to bite it off. I was petrified of those baby hyenas, far more so than I'd ever been with young Tau and Napoleon.

I still never went in with a stick and I tried using the same tactics I had with the lions. Eventually the babies would tire of biting me and sit down a distance away from me. Even though they caused me pain and people continued to say I was wasting my time, I felt sorry for them in their small enclosure. I thought they needed stimulation and if that came in the form of my ankles and shins, then so be it. Also, I didn't want to admit defeat.

The hyenas proved popular with visitors and we expanded the numbers to five, with Trelli, Bonnie, and Chucky. We were convinced Trelli was a girl, but when Bonnie really displayed her phallus one day in all its glory, we could all see how different it was from the others so, in fact, we had one girl and four boys. It had been a very confusing process.

“Howzit, Kevin, it's Maureen here.”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I mumbled a return greeting into my mobile phone. It was early morning and I wondered why Maureen, a local tour operator who often visited the Lion Park, was calling me at home.

“Kevin, I just thought I'd let you know, there are a couple of spotted hyenas walking down the N14 and I thought they might belong to you.”

I nearly tripped over in my rush to get dressed. I jumped in my four-by-four and set off for the Lion Park. The N14 is a busy motorway that links Krugersdorp with Pretoria and in the morning it is thick with commuter traffic. I called Ian at the park and he confirmed Bonnie and Chucky had done it again.

Hyenas, I have learned, are very clever animals, and Bonnie and Chucky were our two top escape artists. At six months they could escape from just about any enclosure we could find or build for them. They knew where the lock was on the sliding gate and if a careless attendant had forgotten to close the padlock, Bonnie and Chucky could knock the lock out of its latch and use their noses to slide the gate open. They had already broken out three or four times, but up until now their wanderings had been confined to within the Lion Park's outer perimeter. I was picturing the news headlines as I crisscrossed the roads around Muldersdrift and tore up and down the main N14 motorway looking for our two escaped inmates.

The phone rang and I snatched it up, still driving and scanning the roadside. “Kev, it's Ian. Come quick, the hyenas are back in the park.”

When I arrived, a cloud of dust following my vehicle as I roared up the dirt road to the park, I found Bonnie and Chucky waiting for me outside their enclosure, waiting to be let back in. They had apparently
escaped sometime during the night, gone out for a wander, and returned at nine
A.M
. the next morning. Relieved, I gave them a gentle scolding then picked each of them up and plonked them back in their home.

There is a small office at the Lion Park where Ian and I have shared many an interesting story or engaged in debates. We were in the office laughing about our close call when Ian's phone rang. As I sipped a cup of coffee I began to worry about the frown on his face as he spoke to the caller.

“Yes,” he said. “Oh, no. I see.”

Ian was still not smiling. “No, okay. Look, I'm very sorry about that. How about we give you three thousand rand, and we call it quits?”

“Give me the bad news,” I said when Ian ended the call.

“Bonnie and Chucky broke into a house down the road last night, terrorized the guy's dogs, and destroyed his lounge suite.”

Forget Bonnie and Chucky—these two were Bonnie and Clyde.

We moved Bonnie and Chucky to the Lion Park's equivalent of a maximum security prison cell, an enclosure with double-locked electrified fences. They still managed to get out a few more times, but in the process they taught me some lessons about hyena behavior.

After they escaped from Fort Knox yet again, I found them wandering in the park. Bonnie came peaceably and I put her back first, but when I carried Chucky into the enclosure he was squealing like a pig. Clearly he wasn't ready to come home. Bonnie started biting me on the ankles and legs. When I put Chucky down, he and Bonnie ganged up on me and now they were both biting me. This was weird because I thought I had a really good relationship with both of them. I realized they were not little kids anymore, but I wasn't ready for my first truly serious bite from a hyena. Bonnie reared up
and grabbed my arm in her mouth and clamped down. Her teeth penetrated both sides of my arm and I felt the terrible crushing force of a hyena's jaws, which is equivalent to seven hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, so the experts say. I needed stitches and my skin was black and blue.

I figured that either I had been taught a lesson or I'd had a lucky escape. Then I started to think about hyena society in the wild. When the hyenas ganged up on me, I think they were telling me my place in the hierarchy. I was the lowest of the low. They tolerated me, but that was about it, which was why they were biting me.

I discussed the hyenas with Rodney, and when I told him Ian and I were considering the idea of forming them into a clan, he was very enthusiastic, as he wanted them to start breeding. Up until now we had kept the hyenas singly or in pairs. Bonnie was at the right age for breeding, so we got an expert, Lawrence Frank, who had done a lot of research on hyenas to come to the park and advise us. I think Lawrence, like many other people, was surprised that I was able to interact with these three- and four-year-old hyenas and that I still had both my arms and legs—even if they were a bit scarred by now.

He agreed with us that forming a clan would give Bonnie more choice about who she wanted to mate with. Space was also becoming an issue, so from a management point of view it would be much better for us at the park if all the hyenas could live together in one of the larger enclosures. Even though Lawrence was an expert on hyenas in the wild, he admitted that we were probably in a better position to make decisions about the animals' future than he was.

To begin the process we decided to divide an enclosure into sections and allow the various hyenas to get to know each other through the common fence. That seemed to work, but when we started putting different animals together they became really violent with each other. It was painful to watch. They would latch on to each others'
ears and start ripping and biting. We took a chance and let them get on with it, even though I winced when I heard cartilage tearing. What we learned was that this was part of hyena life. As the group slowly started coming together they would fight to establish a pecking order. If there was a fight, it would continue until one of the animals decided to submit to the other, and this was repeated each time we introduced a new hyena to the group. They were really violent, but we had to let them sort themselves into a clan.

We added another female, Geena, to the mix, and she and Bonnie used to fight like crazy for the top position. Female hyenas are generally bigger and more aggressive than the males and they have high levels of testosterone coursing through their bodies. It might sound cruel to some people, what we were doing, but in fact we were watching the establishment of a whole society.

One of our male hyenas, Trelli, was a good friend of mine. He was rough and tough, and while the other keepers at the park were scared of him, I used to play with him and even take him for rides in my car, which he loved. When I took him for a drive we would have to travel through the lion enclosure and that used to drive the lions crazy, but Trelli loved it.

His love of cars proved a bonus because one day a request came through from an advertising company that wanted to organize a photo shoot of a spotted hyena that didn't mind posing in a car. I had just the man for the job and Trelli performed like a star. There is a beautiful shot of him with his head out the back window of an estate car, like a dog. During the filming of
Dangerous Companions,
which was about me and my relations with the animals at the Lion Park, we shot a lovely scene in which Gambit, our resident tame giraffe, came up to my pickup to check out Trelli. They touched noses together and Trelli, thankfully, resisted the temptation to rip Gambit's face off while the camera rolled.