Part of the Pride (8 page)

I was hand-raising a Cape White-eye at the time, a tiny little bird which had fallen out of its nest during one of the violent storms that rock the Highveld at the start of the summer wet season. The gym's gardener had brought it in to me.

“
Baas
, I don't know what to do with this thing,” the gardener said, cupping the little chick in his big calloused hands and presenting it to me. Even at work and in adulthood, my reputation as the bird man had followed me from Orange Grove. I raised the white-eye until it fledged, and once he was flying he would still come to me, fluttering into the gym from outside when I called him.

As Rodney pushed his leg against my hands, using resistance to strengthen his leg, the barriers between us started to drop. Rodney asked me about the bird and my love of animals, and I found out that he was incredibly passionate about wildlife, especially lions. Rodney had used part of his wealth to sponsor a lion research camp in the Savuti area of Botswana's Chobe National Park in the late seventies and eighties.

Savuti is a starkly barren, scorching, sandy part of Africa that plays host to a seasonal visitation of zebra and wildebeest that provides an annual feast for the area's lions. Because of the prevalence of huge herds of elephant in the area, the lions there have also learned to hunt these huge creatures. I'd seen wildlife documentaries, such as Dereck Joubert's
Eternal Enemies
, about interactions between lions and hyenas in Savuti, without realizing that the man whose knee I was working on had once been Joubert's employer. Rodney had also funded research by Chris McBride, and other well-known figures in the world of African mammal study. Rodney had apparently given Dereck Joubert his first break in filming wildlife documentaries, and while Joubert has gone on to become a famous filmmaker, he and Rodney had fallen out over a difference of opinion about a particular film project which later was to have a huge impact on my life.

Rodney had always wanted to make a dramatic feature film based on the life of a lion, using footage shot in the wild. Some of the people he had funded had also been tasked with filming for documentaries and the feature film project. Rodney had learned, however, that some scenes were simply too difficult to film using wild animals, and he had visited the Lion Park in Johannesburg to organize footage of lion cubs. The research camp was an expensive business and Rodney admitted he had overextended himself by buying more and more equipment—including more than one aircraft—for his researchers and filmmakers. His business had suffered and he had withdrawn from the camp and shelved his movie project.

When I met Rodney, he was rebuilding his business empire. One day in 1998 he walked into the gym with a smile on his face. “Guess what, Kev? The Lion Park has come up for auction and we bid. Guess what? We bought it!” Rodney was looking to start a new research camp in Zambia, to the north of Botswana and Zimbabwe, and was talking about acquiring land there. To complement the footage captured on film in the wild, he now had a handy collection
of “extras”—lions and various other mammal species at a well-established tourist attraction on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It turned out that Rodney also had a sentimental attachment to the Lion Park as he had met his wife, Ilana, there.

“You should come visit the lions, anytime,” Rodney said to me during our regular session.

I wasn't sure if he was serious, though I know now that even though Rodney is a successful man, he loves sharing his stuff with other people who share his passions. If he has an aircraft and he finds out you love flying then he'll insist you take his plane up. If you enjoy it, he's happy. As it happened, through a mate at the gym I also knew the new manager Rodney had appointed to the park, Richard, whom Rodney had met through a friend of mine in South Africa.

Most of my clients were working people who preferred to schedule their gym appointments for early morning or late afternoon, outside of work hours, so I had most of the day free. I decided to take Rodney up on his offer and one day I took the R512 out of Johannesburg to Muldersdrift. I'd been there once as a kid, and was surprised at how close to the city the park now seemed to be. I'd remembered it back in the day as being in the middle of nowhere. It probably was, back then, but by this time the suburban sprawl was reaching its tentacles around it. Even so, the park was a big chunk of land. From the road I could see wildebeest grazing.

In the car park and reception area was a mix of local families and foreign tourists who had come to interact with the cubs and see Africa's king of the beasts up close through their car windows. I met Richard and he took me away from the main enclosures to show me some lion cubs that Rodney had insisted I visit.

The first were a couple of females, who were still tiny at three weeks. They were in a box and they were incredibly cute. Further along on my private tour we came to another enclosure containing two older cubs. At six or seven months they had reached an age
where they could no longer be petted by human visitors to the park, and they were big—much bigger than I had expected. One was called Napoleon and the other, which had yet to be christened, had the most incredible clear eyes.

Conventional wisdom—or perhaps superstition—among lion keepers, I later learned, was that one should never trust a lion with clear eyes. Like a lot of things people told me about lions over the years to come, and conventional wisdom in general, that little gem turned out to be bullshit.

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but these two young lions were to become my best friends—my brothers.

Richard gave me a briefing before I entered the enclosure with Napoleon and his unnamed brother.

“Don't look them in the eye.

“Don't turn your back on them.

“Don't crouch or kneel, or they will climb up on your back.

“Don't run.

“Don't make any sudden movements.

“Don't scream. Talk quietly.”

It was a long list of things to remember not to do, but I was going in with Richard and I had confidence in his experience. He's a tall guy, and big, and I didn't really do much during that first visit. I petted them, cautiously, and even though they were young, they were very big and quite intimidating. I suppose I was like most visitors to the Lion Park back then. I thought, “Wow, what an experience,” but after it was over my life had to go on. It had been a great day and I was, I think, a little sad to realize that life did, in fact, actually have to go on.

When I next saw Rodney I told him about the visit. “I went to the park and, man, those cubs are so adorable.”

Rodney could see that the visit had touched me. “Well, you must go again. Spend more time with them. Go as often as you want, every day if you like.”

He was ecstatic simply to learn that I had enjoyed myself by visiting the place he'd just bought. He didn't need to make the offer twice, and I started visiting more often. For the first month I visited about twice a week. I would go and meet up with Richard and he would take me on a different behind-the-scenes visit each time. When I saw the grown lions being fed a horse's leg I had my first close-up view of the feeding frenzy that can overtake a big cat, and the way they rip their prey apart with their claws and use the spiky papillae on their tongues to lick the skin from the meat and separate flesh from bone. It was fascinating.

Richard told me that a fully grown male could weigh between 180 and 250 kilograms—up to 550 pounds. In the wild, young males left their family, or pride, at the age of about two. When they reached maturity they would seek to take on a pride of their own. I learned that contrary to popular belief, male lions often play an active part in hunting and this is not just left to the females. I wondered what it would be like to get close enough to one of these huge beasts to run my hands through its long dark mane.

In Camp One at the Lion Park visitors can drive their own vehicles on a road through the lions' enclosure. At the time I first started visiting the park I was driving an Opel Kadett, a compact little car. I stopped to take a look at some lions lazing under a tree and a huge male got up and wandered slowly towards me through the yellow grass. I swallowed hard and felt my heart start to beat faster as he closed the distance between us. I don't think I had truly realized just how big a lion was until that moment. His beautiful maned head was higher than the roof of my car and he looked down at me through the window.

When he roared, the car vibrated. It was like the scene in the
movie
Jurassic Park
where the Tyrannosaurus Rex is breathing on the people in the four-by-four. It was awesome, in the truest sense of the word.

After about a month of my visiting the park on a regular basis, Richard let me go into the enclosure with Napoleon and his clear-eyed brother alone. When I walked in through the gate by myself I thought those two lion cubs were going to kill me. The still-unnamed one was feisty. He would stare at me with his piercing, pitiless eyes and then launch himself at me, biting and mauling me with his claws and paws, which were already the size of saucers. I thought, “Shit, this thing wants to chow me!” Now I know that rather than wanting to eat me, he was simply playing.

If this was play, though, it was roughhouse stuff. When the clear-eyed one locked his jaws on my hand and started biting down with those needle-like teeth of his, it felt like he was going to rip my hand off. I think my attitude towards these two lions was that as much as I loved seeing them and being with them, I didn't want to impose on them. I felt I simply had to wait, and grin and bear their ripping and biting until they tired of it.

“Shit, Richard, is this safe?” I asked him one day as I inspected a fresh set of scratches and my ripped shirt. I had started buying my shirts from the Mr. Price discount shop by this stage, as I was going through about one a week.

“I don't know, Kev,” he said.

“Great,” I thought, “and you're the expert. Just great.” Richard was probably no more expert in the keeping of captive lions than I was at that time.

Richard kept going into the enclosure with the two young lions so I, as someone who can never resist a challenge, kept going in, as well. I have to admit that I was a little concerned, as despite what some of my friends and family say, I don't really have a death wish.

“You'd better give that one with the clear eyes a name,” Richard said to me one day as I inspected the rips in my latest cheap shirt. I'd gone through a brief phase of wearing overalls when I was with the lions, but it had been too hot so I'd resigned myself to more trips to Mr. Price.

I wasn't sure if he was serious about naming the lion, so I ran it past Rodney during his next session at the gym. Rodney was clearly pleased that I was enjoying spending time with the lions, but as the cats did, in fact, belong to him, I asked for his permission. He told me it would be his pleasure for me to name the lion.

I didn't want to name him something corny, like Savuti or Serengeti. After many hours of thought I came up with the name Tau, which means lion in the Tswana language. Clearly, I was getting a little more sophisticated than the days when I named my frog. I thought it was a good, strong, original name, and I was proud. Only later did I learn that practically every second safari lodge and camp in southern Africa has the word Tau in its name.

Rodney mentioned to me during a session in the gym that too many of his senior staff at Supermart were unfit, overweight, or out of shape. He asked me if I would be interested in going on the payroll, working part of my day as a private trainer for him and his staff, with the rest of the day free for me to spend at the Lion Park.

I didn't particularly like private training and had deliberately shied away from working in that field when I was England, but the arrangement Rodney proposed was interesting. For a start, it would allow me to give him something back, and to formalize my by now daily visits to his lions. I was spending more and more time with Tau and Napoleon. I now realized I was developing a close relationship with the fast-growing cubs, one of whom I had named. I had also named the two females I'd seen on the day I first met my boys. I called them Maditau and Tabby.

After Tau and Napoleon had tired of biting and scratching me, I would sit in the enclosure with them for two or three hours a day, just watching them. I didn't set out to break the accepted rules of lion keeping, but I found that the rule about not sitting or crouching around the lions was causing problems, not least of all with my wardrobe. It seemed to me that when they jumped up and started clawing me, they were trying to drag me down to their level. After some play closer to the ground they would eventually tire of attacking me and we'd sit calmly in the grass near each other, but not touching.

As we sat there, I began to think about them, how they were alike and how they were different. Napoleon seemed like a long-lost brother trapped in a lion's body, my soul mate. He's regal, confident, and ruggedly good-looking with an extremely compassionate disposition. He's the kind of lion who will do things without putting too much thought into it. Sound familiar? Tau was also a soul mate of a different sort. He's a lion who was not as well liked by people in his younger years because of his tricky personality. I knew that all he needed was some understanding, patience, and love. Tau is a lion unsure of people's intentions, and therefore always a little more reserved. He won't just jump into the fire. His shy nature, contrasted with his crystal clear eyes, is what intrigues people about him. When Tau's in a bad mood, unlike Napeoleon, you can change it. He needs time, just like I do when I'm in a bad mood; I hate nothing more than someone thinking they can fix it for me. Tau takes a while to get his temper up, but when he does, don't get in his way. He'll kill you now and ask questions later.

When Rodney found out exactly how much time I was spending at the park, he offered to pay me for my time there as well as the private training. There were management changes happening at the same time and I think he also needed someone on the staff that he knew. I was employed as an animal welfare and animal enrichment worker, which basically meant my job was to help manage the
animals, as well as look for ways to keep them occupied and content in captivity. To be honest, I wasn't totally sure what my job title meant, but I knew it included being around Tau and Napoleon, so I was happy. I'd still been working with my other clients at the gym in the afternoons, but the new arrangement meant I was training Rodney's staff in the mornings and then spending my afternoons at the Lion Park.