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.
We auditioned potential scriptwriters, asking them for ideas about how they would write a script based on Rodney’s basic idea for the story. The writers we subsequently worked with were under a lot of stress, because although the idea for the story sounded simple, they were under very stringent direction from Rodney about what could and couldn’t be in the script. Some of the writers wanted to overcomplicate the story and work in some mythical elements. For example, the Shangaan people believe that a white lion is born when a shooting star falls from the heavens, but Rodney didn’t want the audience to think the film was a fable. He wanted to show the real Africa, not a mythological one. In many respects the writers weren’t given much creative freedom because Rodney wanted to be true to the real Africa; however, he became more flexible over time as he realized the ins and outs of compelling storytelling.
We wanted to shoot the movie in much the same way as we would a documentary, such as Dangerous Companions, getting the lions to do things as naturally as possible, rather than trying to stage-manage them. I had to make it clear to the people who worked on the film that we couldn’t plan on making the lions and other animals do exactly what they wanted at exactly the right time. It wasn’t like shooting a commercial where all the lion had to do was walk from left to right, look at the camera, shake its head, and walk off. I needed to find people who had experience working with animals.
One of the questions I was constantly asked by people who knew the film industry was this: “Will your lions be able to continue working for the long periods required for a feature film?” I needed to start thinking about how many lions I would need for the various scenes. In the end, we used thirty different white lions to play the lead character, Letsatsi, throughout the various ages of his life, and over the course of what stretched from months into years of filming. Lions grow very quickly so I needed to preplan in advance to make sure we had enough lions of the right age to play Letsatsi at the right times of his life. This on its own presented a huge challenge.
Letsatsi, which means “the sun,” was the first white lion born at the Lion Park and we used his name as that of the lead character. Our plan was that Letsatsi would do most of the filming as his adult self in the movie, but you can only really learn how a lion is going to behave during filming by putting him in front of a large group of people.
Rodney wanted the film to be set against the backdrop of the wilds of Africa, and by that he meant that we wanted wide-open vista shots of lions set in endless expanses of Africa. That wasn’t so much of a problem for me, I thought, as my methods were already very different from those of other lion wranglers who worked on television and films. All the lion wranglers I know of want their lions to be fenced—they won’t take a chance of letting them roam free. That means if you want to set up a wide shot, then somewhere out there in the not-too-distant distance there needs to be a fence. I was happy, however, to work my lions in large expanses, on huge farms. I was confident that they would not feel the need to go wandering off to the other side of the farm. The film crew, however, would be behind fences, while the lions walked free, with me. It’s far quicker, cheaper, and easier to cage the people in a five-meter by five-meter cage, than setting up a huge perimeter fence for the lions.
I was aware of the risks, such as a lion running off and chasing some game on whatever farm we were using, but I was confident in my animals’ abilities, and the relationship I had with my lions.
One of the other strict criteria Rodney had for his film was that it would show Africa like it had never been shown before.
“What do you mean by that, Rod?” I asked him early on.
“I don’t want to show Africa in the winter, I want to show Africa in the summer, when the grass is green and the bush is thick and lush.”
There is, as I had learned during the making of the French film, The Lion, a good reason why nearly every documentary or film you see made in Africa shows the grass long and dry and golden, and the bush in shades of dull khaki and brown. It is because most filming is done in the long, dry, relatively cool African winter, which is ideal for filming, as opposed to the hot, wet summer months. In the winter dry season, the ground is firm and you are virtually assured of clear blue skies every day for months on end. Sunrises and sunsets are spectacular and the golden hours, just after dawn and just before dusk, are perfect for filming. The sun is lower in the sky and you get more hours of light to film in. Also, the cool temperatures are ideal for working animals
By contrast, in summer it rains nearly every day. It is hot and humid, and the dust and dirt turn to thick, cloying mud. Sunrises and sunsets are often obscured by towering cloud banks, and you can have three or four dark, dingy days at a time when the cloud and mist and even fog take hold. You can have thundershowers in the morning and you’re virtually guaranteed to have them every afternoon. To make a feature film in the South African Highveld in summer, you have to be crazy. You guessed it. We were.
December 2005, when we began filming, was particularly bad. It rained, and it rained, and it rained. We changed from day shoots to night shoots to try and escape the rain, but then it started pouring at night. We changed from night back to day, but the rain stayed ahead of our plans and played havoc with crew turnaround times, as people needed appropriate breaks between shoots.
Everything around us was luscious and green, but that was the only thing going according to plan. Every week we were delayed added another week to the age of the lions we were using, which created problems with continuity. We couldn’t stop our white lion cubs from growing. We simply weren’t getting the footage we needed and we battled to make progress during that first summer season of filming.
We had vehicles stuck in the mud, and spent money we hadn’t budgeted to hire special eight-wheel recovery vehicles to tow our other trucks out of the thick, cloying muck. Eventually, even the tow vehicles and the Lion Park’s trusty tractor got stuck in the mud. I remember spending a whole night pulling and digging vehicle after vehicle out of the mud for the end result of not a second’s worth of filming. I wanted to cry that night.
Many of the sets and locations we chose were ruined by vehicles and people churning the grass into mud, and even when we could film, the lions quickly got wet and dirty. The white lions, in particular, had to be cleaned on a regular basis. Twice a day I would have to phone Rodney and give him an update. He would be sitting at home, in his living room in Johannesburg, watching the rain patter his windowpanes, and I would have to call him and confirm his worst nightmares, that for the cost of between 40,000 and 120,000 Rand per day we were achieving absolutely nothing. To make things worse, the rain always seemed to come on the days we had hired the most expensive equipment.
Thinking back on it now, as the final edits of White Lion are locked away, I realize our earlier schedules were too ambitious. We were trying to cram too much into a short time, during the worst season of the year to be filming. The whole thing was a learning process, partly because this was the first time anyone had tried to film a full-length feature film using lions as the stars, in as natural a setting as possible, in the African summer.
I promise you, I now know why Disney’s The Lion King was animated. During that first season of shooting I was starting to think that it was just not possible to make a movie about lions using real lions without spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Rodney was also probably starting to wonder what he had got himself into. There was, though, a ray of light: when we were able to film, and later sit down and go through the rushes, the footage we were getting was absolutely amazing. It was, as Rodney had desired, Africa like we had never seen it on film before. Here we had these beautiful snow white lions set against the lush emerald greens of the grass and bush in full bloom. It really was striking and Rodney’s wish was coming true. This was something different, something special.
Early on, before shooting even began, I started getting Letsatsi, our only adult male lion, used to the idea of playing himself in a movie.
To start with I had to get him accustomed to being loaded into a vehicle and unloaded, so that we could transport him easily around the park and to the various farms and other locations we would be using in the film. Half of the job of getting a lion to work on a film is just getting him to the set safely, and unstressed. A stressed lion is dangerous to both himself and humans. I’ve seen lions bash their heads until they bleed and break teeth off when they’re upset.
To make it easy on ourselves, we built a new fifteen-hectare enclosure off the back of the Lion Park where we would be able to film some of our story. We also used our current property, the Kingdom of the White Lion, which Rodney had bought in 2000. For the shots that required truly wide-open spaces and panoramic vistas, we used a place called Nash’s Farm that totals about 22,000 hectares. It is, I believe, the single largest freehold game farm in the province of Gauteng. The farm held wildebeest, giraffe, impala, and other species of game.
“Hey, boet, you’re taking big chances with these lions,” said a guy called Hennie, who managed the farm, when I told him about our plans for filming.
“Don’t you worry,” I told him confidently. “It’ll be fine.”
By the end of our first rainy season of filming in early 2006, we had enough of an idea of what our story would be, and almost enough good footage, to go to the Cannes Film Festival in France to promote our project. What we needed, though, was a promotional clip—a promo—including some footage of our big adult white lion, the majestic Letsatsi, our star, striding through a wide-open expanse of lush, green Africa in her summer finery. I had worked with Letsatsi on other shoots, although he had yet to play himself in the filming of the motion picture in which he would star. His first appearance before the camera, and his future public, for White Lion would be the filming of the promo.
We drove Letsatsi out to Nash’s farm to shoot the scenes for the promo, which would also be used in the film. We also decided to use the day to promote the film to the local media, so we had an assortment of press people, photographers, TV, and even the big boss, Rodney Fuhr, penned in a temporary cage in the middle of the veld, along with our own film crew. We had been setting up since three-thirty in the morning and there was an air of excited expectancy as the truck carrying the star lion rolled to a stop in the thick green grass.
As soon as we let Letsatsi out of the truck and I looked into his eyes, I started getting that sinking feeling. In a vain attempt to get Letsatsi back on the truck, I started shouting, “Load him, load him,” to Rodney Nombekana, Alex, and Helga, who had all come from the Lion Park to help wrangle Letsatsi. But we were out of luck. Letsatsi looked out over those twenty-two thousand hectares of Africa and didn’t look back at the truck. Despite my assurances to Hennie that everything would be all right, Letsatsi decided that he had had enough of the film world, and of captivity. He started walking.
“Load him!”
Rodney Nombekana shook his head. “He’s going, Kev.”
I started walking with Letsatsi, as though this was all part of the plan, and the cameras started rolling. “Get what you can,” I hissed.
“Kev, Kev, get out of the shot,” the cameraman was calling back to me. I was walking beside Letsatsi, although my confident stride was an illusion as by now I had no control over what he was doing or where he was going. I had to continually lie down in the grass or duck behind a mound so the crew could get something—anything—of Letsatsi in action before he disappeared into the wilds of Nash’s farm. If it hadn’t been such a disaster it might have been comical. I would drop out of sight for a few seconds, then get up and frantically run to catch up with Letsatsi, appear to wrangle him, then duck for cover once more. The same thing was happening to Rodney and Helga, who were also having to run and dive.
Initially, Letsatsi wasn’t aggressive. He just didn’t want to do what anyone told him; not me, not Rodney, not Helga, and not Alex. Letsatsi usually lived for treats—pieces of meat given as a reward—but on that day, in front of all those cameras, not even the morsels I was pulling out of my pocket were enough to make him behave. Also, he started to tire of us running in front of him and trying to corral him and began growling all the time.
I think Letsatsi had been overawed by the sight of all the people waiting to see him and I believe he suffered stage fright. He was just not interested in performing in front of that crowd of people. As with Tsavo in front of my family, and Ricksey the cheetah in front of my wife-to-be Mandy, here was an animal that had sensed a different vibe and decided to behave differently around strangers.
In the park, Letsatsi was a fat, lazy lump of lard. He lived in a medium-sized camp and was always happy in it. He never needed a lot of space, and in true adult male lion fashion all he ever wanted to do was eat, sleep, and make love. I loved him to bits, but our relationship took a big strain that day, when all of a sudden he decided he wanted to roam free. In fact, my five-year relationship with him went down the toilet at that point. He sensed our anxiety the first time he stepped out of that truck. I had lost his respect, and he was telling me, simply and without aggression, that it was over between us. My relationships with Helga, Rodney Nombekana, and Alex were also strained that day, because I was accountable for Letsatsi’s lack of behavior.
It wasn’t just that day that caused the relationship to go sour with Letsatsi. Some lions are brilliant filming lions; some are more relaxed than others around tourists, or with me when I go in with them. Letsatsi wasn’t a filming lion, and I think despite trying to convince ourselves that everything would be all right on the big day, Rodney Nombekana and I had already seen the writing on the wall. We’d already had many discussions about Letsatsi prior to the filming day. Letsatsi had never enjoyed being loaded and driven around on the trucks, unlike Tau and Napoleon, who love that sort of thing. However, he was our only adult white lion at the time and we just had to hope that it would work out. It didn’t.
I am not exaggerating when I say that Rodney, Helga, and I followed that lion on his walk across Nash’s farm for five hours. Eventually we decided it was safe for the film crew to get out of their enclosure, pack up, and move location, leaving us to get Letsatsi back to the park. Letsatsi hadn’t turned wild and decided he wanted to kill people, though after five kilometers of strolling across the open plains, he caught scent of Hennie the farm manager’s horses.
“Guys, this is starting to get out of control,” I said, delivering one of the great understatements of my career as a lion caregiver and filmmaker. “Get the dart gun.”
I was still walking behind Letsatsi, but now every time I closed within about four meters of him he would turn, flare his lip at me, and growl. He was giving me some very clear signals and he was a very big lion.
Alex went back and fetched the tranquilizing drugs and a dart gun that we always kept with us on shoots, just in case. He drove back to where we were, still following Letsatsi en route to Hennie’s horses.
“What’s going to happen?” Hennie asked me. “Is he going to eat my bloody horses?”
“It’ll be fine,” I said, in my most confident voice. I neglected to tell Hennie that Letsatsi often ate horse meat at the Lion Park, although I was praying Letsatsi didn’t know what a whole horse looked like!
We might have been making a movie, but darting a lion is not as easy as it seems on TV. I worked faster than I ever have before, pressurizing the air-powered gun, lubricating the barrel, assembling the dart, mixing up a double concentration of Zoletil, drawing the drug, and attaching the rubber stopper on the end of the needle so the fluid wouldn’t leak out. Zoletil is a good drug to use when tranquilizing lions; it is safe and even if the dosages are not spot on it does not have adverse side effects.
I had one shot at Letsatsi. If I missed, or if the dart just pricked him and fell out, he would be off like a shot and in amongst Hennie’s horses before I had time to prepare another projectile and reload. I loaded the dart in the gun and stalked as close as I dared to Letsatsi. I raised the stock of the gun to my shoulder, took aim at his pristine white rump, and fired. The dart left the barrel with a pfft of compressed air.
“Rooooaaaaaaaaaar,” bellowed Letsatsi. Man, was he pissed off.
He ran around in circles, and for a second I thought he would turn, charge me, and kill me. I stood my ground as Letsatsi calmed himself. Still angry, he walked to a patch of shade under a tree and lay down.
We humans sat down and waited for the drug to take effect, while reflecting on what had just happened to us all. The Zoletil took hold of him after about ten minutes and Letsatsi fell asleep. There were five of us there—me, Alex, Rodney Nombekana, Helga, and Hennie the worried farmer—but that wasn’t enough people to lift Letsatsi. The ground at Nash’s farm is seriously rocky and we had been following Letsatsi on foot. Alex had brought the vehicle back as close as he could, but there was no way we could pick Letsatsi up and carry him to the bakkie. It took about twenty minutes to drive the truck twenty yards over the rocks to where the lion lay.
In the meantime I gave Letsatsi a top-up of Zoletil. Finally we had the pickup parked next to him. The five of us, grunting and cursing under the strain of more than six hundred pounds of dead weight of lion, just managed to lift Letsatsi high enough to slide him into the rear carrying compartment of the vehicle.
“We’re completely stuffed,” I said to Rodney Nombekana as we drove Letsatsi back to the park. Rodney nodded. We still had plenty more filming to do, but our star had quit on us, and, though we tried again in vain, he never worked on the film shoot again.
My relationship with Letsatsi had deteriorated not only because of peer pressure, but because of money pressure. I had been pushing him harder and harder in the weeks that led up to his spectacular walkout, not because I wanted to prove to the crew and other onlookers that Letsatsi would follow my every command, no matter how tired he was, but because I was working to a budget.
“You shouldn’t feel responsible for things going wrong. It’s not your fault,” Rodney Fuhr said to me.
But I did feel responsible. I was involved in every aspect of this film’s production, from the animal wrangling to the writing, from the catering to the artistic direction. I was feeling pulled in every direction. Someone had to be responsible when things didn’t go according to plan, and it was usually me.
It would have been different if I had just been involved in one part of the film. In the past, when I was working as an animal wrangler on commercial shoots, I had pulled lions when I sensed they were in danger of being overworked. I would happily say to other film crews, “Guys, look, you’ve got one more take and then this lion is going to bed,” and they would always respect that. My job had been not only to ensure that the lions delivered, but to look after their welfare, as well. If I had been simply the wrangler on the set of White Lion, I probably wouldn’t have unloaded Letsatsi from the truck in the first place, as I would have been able to sense—and obey that feeling—that everything was not right with this lion. In fact, I would have sensed all was not right much sooner and pulled the plug months before the shoot, as the signs of Letsatsi not working were there for all to see.
As the animal wrangler and producer, I was wearing two hats. If a lion performed the same action five times, I might still want him to do it again for a sixth, to ensure we got the best possible shot. As a wrangler I would have called a halt after four or five—more than a crew would experience on most film or television shoots—but as producer I would go to bed at night worrying that we had ended up with a second-rate shot.
I was pushing the lions—all the white lions that played Letsatsi at various ages, and his brown lion companions. In the first two seasons of filming, summer 2005–2006, and again in the wet season of 2006–2007, I learned a lot more than I ever had about lions and their limits. Poor Letsatsi had cracked before he even got started on White Lion.
It’s important for me to point out that I would never allow any animal cruelty during the filming of White Lion, no matter how far behind schedule we were. In South Africa, as happens around the world, animal welfare experts are always present on film shoots to ensure no improper or cruel practices are employed when working with animals, and that no animal is harmed during the course of the production. I have had a very good relationship with the Animal Anti Cruelty League (AACL) over a number of years. I have really come to respect their welfare officers. They have a tricky and difficult job, ensuring the rights of animals are protected in the high-pressure environment of a film set. Film people always want to get the best possible shot and they’re being paid a lot of money to be there.
One very experienced guy from AACL, Rulof Jackson, had a way about him that engendered respect. I see the anti-cruelty people as friends and a backup on set, not as adversaries. When things are not going right with an animal and the pressure is increasing to make the shoot go according to plan, it’s the AACL person who will step in and say things are becoming dangerous. As a producer on White Lion, it was sometimes difficult for me to walk the line between getting the job done and watching out for the animals’ interests. It was at times like that that I really appreciated Rulof being there. He did a great job, and I think it’s fair to say we came out of the project with a great deal of respect for each other.
We never broke the rules, but I don’t think that it is necessarily a bad thing to put an animal under a little bit of stress when working with it. Animals need to be challenged and kept active and interested in what is going on around them—it breaks the monotony of captivity—but in my heart of hearts I knew that I was sometimes pushing too much. When Letsatsi walked out on me at Nash’s farm it wasn’t because I had hurt him, it was because he was sick of me and the lead-up work we had been doing together.
The pressure to make a perfect film did not lessen, particularly as shooting stretched over the following two years. In all, we filmed over three summer seasons, from 2005 through 2008. However, I knew that sometimes, from that point onwards, I would have to settle for a “good enough” shot of a lion rather than the best that money could buy.
As it turned out, people in the know who have seen parts of the film were amazed at some of the shots we did get. We were pioneering techniques, working animals in wide-open, unfenced spaces. Other filmmakers might have used locked-off cameras, keeping the frame still so that footage of a lion walking could be cut and pasted in later. We were doing it live, often in one take, so shots that I thought could have been done better were wowing people. Our philosophy was to get as much that was “real” action on film as we could, in order to save time and money on post production. Of course, for some scenes we still had to use blue screens and split screens, where different people or animals are filmed on the same set, but at different times, especially when safety was an issue.
Rodney Nombekana helped keep me true to the principles that I had applied when working with lions before the film, and that I had tried to instill in him. He became my conscience, and he was very good at it.
“Kev, I think we maybe need to give this lion a rest now if we want to work him tomorrow,” Rodney would say to me gently, on occasions after Letsatsi freaked out. In essence, he was doing for me what I had done for directors and producers on shoots in the past.
The downside of the way I work with lions is that when a relationship breaks down, as mine did with Letsatsi, there is sometimes no going back if you pass that point of no return.
A lion tamer or wrangler who works with a shock stick, or a stick, or a whip, will probably always be able to get his lion to jump up on a chair or through a hoop whether the animal hates him or tolerates him. For me, I couldn’t change methods in midstream.
Following the debacle at Nash’s Farm, the other production team members started to convince themselves that perhaps Letsatsi’s walkout was a one-off. “Maybe he was just wowed by the wide open spaces, or put off by the number of people on the set that day,” one of the guys said to me during a production meeting. “Maybe we should give him another chance. What do you think, Kev?”
I could hardly say to them that no, our one big white male lion would never work again, even though that was what I believed in my heart of hearts. “Okay, let’s give it a try,” I said, bowing to the pressure again.
We thought that if we put Letsatsi in the fifteen-hectare enclosure at the back of the Lion Park, we might be able to get some footage of him doing things at his own pace. There was another pride living in the big enclosure, two males named Jamu and Mogli, and their four lionesses, one of whom, Ice, was heavily pregnant. We relocated them without difficulty, but it was a different matter altogether when it came to moving our temperamental star white lion to his new home. Letsatsi was onto our game and did not want to play. It was a mission just to load him into the truck to move him to the bigger enclosure, but eventually we managed to get him there.
Letsatsi became progressively more aggressive and he started to learn, like a disobedient child, that we were intimidated by his behavior, and that we would back off from him when he showed his anger. It was a case of stimulus and response, and he kept upping the ante. He would see me and growl, and I had to say to the other executives on the film, “This has gone beyond a lion refusing to work—this is about a lion becoming dangerous.”
We had moved Jamu and Mogli and their girls out on a Friday, and Letsatsi into the big enclosure on the same day. On that Saturday morning the film crew arrived and we tried to work with Letsatsi. He was impossible. He refused to respond to food or any other stimulus and just sat around doing absolutely nothing. His urge to explore, which had been so strong on Nash’s farm, was nowhere to be seen. It was a complete waste of time, so we finished work at lunchtime.
“Should we move him back to his small enclosure, Kev?” Rodney Nombekana asked me.
I shook my head. “It was so bloody difficult getting him here I doubt he’d load again. Look at him,” I said, gesturing over to Letsatsi, who was sitting under a tree glaring at me. “He’s not going to get in a truck or do anything we want him to do. Let’s give him some time and space, Rod, and see how he’s doing on Monday.” With that, Rodney and I went home for the rest of the weekend, and the film crew left with diddly squat.
I was tired and depressed and frustrated and, as usual, Mandy had to bear the brunt of me unloading my woes when I got home. She, more than anyone, knows what I went through during the filming of White Lion. She saw the relationships with lions and people erode, and was always there to let me vent when I needed to.
On Monday morning Rodney and I turned up to the big enclosure to check on Letsatsi. I called him, but couldn’t see him. We began walking along the fence line, but there was no sign of him. He’s a very big, very white lion, and the bush was very green at that time of the year, so he normally stood out a mile off.
“Letsatsi!” I called.
Rodney looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Neither of us could see him, so we decided we would go in and look for him. Fifteen hectares is a sizeable area, and this enclosure contained a good deal of natural vegetation, which we had hoped would look good in the film.
We started working a search grid, moving slowly from left to right through the long grass and bush of the enclosure, calling his name as we went, and keeping each other in sight for safety. We couldn’t find him. “This is crazy. He can’t have disappeared,” I said.
“Escaped?”
I shook my head, not even wanting to consider the possibility of this cranky male lion being somewhere on the loose. It had been bad enough when Bonny and Chucky the Houdini hyenas had got out and chewed up the guy’s lounge suite. In the mood he was in, Letsatsi might prefer people to furniture. To be sure, I checked the fencing and searched for spoor, but there were no gaps in the wire and no tracks or other signs that Letsatsi had got through, under, or over either one of the two fences that surrounded the big enclosure.
“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.