How I almost got Eaten by Lions

“I looked around, and just three or four metres from Leon, a lioness was going down on her haunches, ready to launch. It was an incredibly tense moment, and as my finger squeezed the trigger, I was sure that I was about to die.”

You probably all know about the poachers who cut off rhino horns and smuggle them to the East, since the people there believe that it is an aphrodisiac, a superstition, because it is made out of the same material as our nails, so they might just as well bite their own, grind it down, and sniff it.

We were working at Sabie Sands, a conglomeration of farms next to the Kruger National Park. The fence between the park and the farms is open, so the animals can walk through. Sabie Sands caters mostly to rich Americans and Europeans, who fly in, land at their private airfield, and are then treated at a five-star lodge to exotic dishes that they won’t usually eat where they are from, like Springbok Carpaccio, Kudu, Eland, and other game meat.

During the day, rangers drive the guests around and show them the wild animals, a real African safari adventure. At night, when the guests are back at the lodge, we, the anti-poaching unit, mostly made up of former soldiers, drove around, trying to stop the poachers from killing the rhinos.

The Asians are not the only people who are superstitious. The local black population who live near the farms believe in muti, traditional African medicine, often using magic, and sangomas, traditional healers who claim to work with ancestral spirits to heal and perform magic, in a word, witchdoctors. They often looked for lion bones or other animal parts that they use to perform rituals and spells, and they were willing to pay well for it. Sometimes people would trespass on the farms to kill some of the animals and sell their parts to the sangomas.

The guys who worked with me, mostly Angolans, who all claimed to be Catholics, were also very superstitious and believed in the magic of the sangomas. Of course, some people would say being a Catholic or a Christian makes you superstitious too.

A few of them could not drive well, so whenever we had to go somewhere in our open Land Rovers, vehicles without windshields or windows on the side, presumably to allow the guests an unhampered view of the African landscape and wildlife, I would let them drive so that they can improve. One fine day we were driving around a corner and came upon an owl sitting in the middle of the road. Before I could stop him, the driver slammed his foot down on the accelerator, and we hit the owl so hard that it exploded in a burst of feathers. Angry, I turned to him and asked him why he did that? We were there to protect the animals, not to maim them.

The man shrugged and said: “That is not an owl; it is a witch in animal form.” This same guy told me at a different occasion that if I want to win the lottery, all I have to do is catch a large, deadly snake, put it in a room and feed it a thousand Rand. Then it is apparently a sure thing that I will win the money back with interest. How you are supposed to feed money to a deadly snake is not clear to me, so I haven’t taken him up on his advice yet.

This man, whom I won’t name, was a wellspring of shocking stories. He told me how, at his previous job at a security company in Hazyview, the setting of the horror film Wolwedans in die Skemer, based on a book by Leon van Nierop, when there was not enough crime for the month, they would go and break into the houses of people and steal their goods, to ensure that they will keep paying the security company to protect their property. The company was creating their own demand. How diligent and industrious of them, corrupt to the core like almost everything else in South Africa.

We were living in a bush camp at the highest point on the farm, behind a bulldozed wall of sand, created to hide us from the view of the guests. We were the naughty secret nobody was supposed to know about. They did not even want us to linger at the nearest shop or at the local tavern. Wild animals would often walk through our camp site. We slept in small wooden huts, and I remember, one day, the guys woke me up and told me to look out of the window. As I carefully pulled away the curtains, I gazed into the face of a giant elephant that was eating the leaves on a tree standing next to the window. That was frightening, since those jumbo Dumbos can walk through those huts like they are nothing.

Often after we finished eating, packs of hyenas would come into the camp, looking for something to scavenge.

We had an open shower, with reeds packed to cover our nudity while we showered, but open at the top and low enough for us to look out over magnificent scenery. Sometimes you could see large herds of animals walking across the savannah while you rubbed shampoo into your hair. One guy had a close call when he walked from the shower to the huts and came face to face with a lion. It happened before I got there, so I can’t say if he had to change his underwear and clean himself up again after his encounter with the cruel king of the cats.

Lions are the king of the jungle, but in our little corner of the world, the elephants were unquestionably the emperors. They are very powerful and can easily overturn the Land Rovers we were driving in. Many of them came from Mozambique where poachers frequently shot at them with AK-47 assault rifles to kill them so that they can hack the tusks out of their skulls and sell it for profit. Elephants are famous for having long memories, so they remember that people tried to harm them, which makes them more aggressive than usual, causing them to often charge at us when we got too close to them, a terrifying sight.

Near our camp there was a grumpy male elephant that was rejected by the herd, and that seemed to have made him even more aggressive than the rest. At certain times we could see liquid flowing from his ears, apparently a sign that he is sultry, a warning that caused us to be even more careful, since when he was in this mood, he attacked us whenever we were in his vicinity. So, when we drove out at night, we always kept an eye out for this beast.

One day, we drove through a bushy area, and as we rounded a corner, this elephant was sleeping next to the road. We managed to pass him quickly, but he stood up and started to stomp after us. Flustered, we shouted to the guy who was driving: “Go, Leon, go!”

To our horror, he stopped the vehicle dead in the road.

We looked at him. and then we looked behind us where the elephant was charging, crushing bushes and trumpeting loudly. Leon was an older guy, a friend of the boss, who could not hear well, so I put my hand on his shoulder, pointed vigorously down the road, and bellowed in his ear: “Go, Leon, go!”

This time Leon got it and he floored the pedal. The men on the back of the Land Rover started to scream. The elephant was almost on us. The wheels spun, kicking up a cloud of dust, and then we shot forward, just in time as the elephant broke through the last clump of bushes separating us from him. We drove recklessly along the bumpy bush path, looking behind us as the elephant kept coming. We went as fast as we could. When we finally got to a place where we thought we were safe, Leon stopped the vehicle and we all turned to him and asked why he stopped in the road just after we passed the elephant. He said: “I heard: ‘Whoa Leon, whoa.’” Bad hearing can get you killed.

Elephants weren’t the only creatures we needed to watch out for. There were huge, orange spiders that came out at night and spun large webs between the trees. Sometimes they would spin them right across the road. If you were not careful, you would go through one of these webs, picking up unwanted passengers in the process. Then you would have to stop and flick them off, being careful that the spiders do not bite you. One guy was bitten, the wound got infected, and he had to go for an operation to cut it out, so these arachnids are dangerous.

One night we drove through such a web and heard “dub, dub, dub” on the roof of the vehicle. The next moment several spiders abseiled from above, like S.W.A.T. team members, and dropped in our laps. The vehicle screeched to a halt and we frantically performed a spastic dance as we tried to brush these nasty beasties off us.

Eventually we shone a torch in front of us as we drove, to see where these webs were spread across the road and we used a long stick to scratch them out of the way. This meant going slow at night and, of course, it was not ideal to shine a torch, because it shows poachers from which direction you are coming. One guy, a Brit who was flying drones for us, said it was like driving through Jurassic Park at night, and that was how it felt.

We used drones with infrared cameras that can pick up the body heat of the poachers. If we saw anyone, we talked the security teams on to the position, and then they tried to catch the crooks.

Our main job was to protect the rhinos. They are fairly easy to locate, since they like to eat a certain plant. We marked where these plants grow on a map, and usually when we went there, we would find the big horned ones. Sometimes we dropped two armed men off at each of these locations where they would wait quietly to listen and see if any poachers show up. At some of these locations there were observation platforms or high trees in which we could climb. This was sometimes necessary, since a team was once charged by a black rhino, who kept them in the trees for several hours until a relief team arrived in Land Rovers to rescue them.

One night we were lying on an observation platform, when we heard bushes breaking. “Here they come,” I thought, as I slipped the safety clip off my rifle and took aim. I took a deep breath and stared through the sights of my weapon. Suddenly, a lone hyena broke through the bushes, looked pathetically up at us, and then ambled on to wherever he was going.

The incident I want to tell you about happened when Leon and I were dropped off in an area where there were no big trees to climb. It was getting late, time for the guys in the Land Rovers to come and pick us up. We usually rotated the teams after a few hours, since it gets boring to sit and wait quietly at one spot all night, and we did not want the guys to fall asleep.

I walked to the road and looked in the direction where we were expecting them to come from. In the moonlight, under a small tree, I saw a pair of huge paws. An ice cold shiver ran down my spine. I hurried back, and said: “Leon, there are lions.” As I uttered the words, I saw that they were all around us: fourteen lionesses, out hunting with their cubs.

Leon and I were standing back to back, facing outwards. We put on our torches and shone them in a semi-circle, each covering his side of the three hundred and sixty degree death trap. We were surrounded. Numerous cold, cruel, cat eyes glowed back at us. “Count them,” Leon said. “What the fuck for?” I retorted, as I cocked my rifle. Leon just stood there, sheepishly looking at the lions.

At the lodge, the rangers told us that. if we ever come across any lions, we have nothing to worry about. All we have to do is tap the magazine of our rifle, and they will go away, since they they do not like the sound. Leon and I tapped for all that we were worth, eyes wide and shaking from fear, quaking in our boots. The tapping helped not a bit. The lions circled us and kept coming closer.

I remember when I was in the army, the instructors told us that if you wound a lion, it will charge and kill you. The calibre of the rifles we carried, Dashprods, not the best kind of weapon to use in the bush, were not large enough to stop a charging lion.

The lionesses growled and hemmed us in, licking their lips.

I looked behind me, and saw one lioness going down on her haunches, preparing to pounce on Leon. It was an incredibly tense moment. Either I am going to shoot or the lion is going to leap. It was as if the world slowed down as I tightened my finger on the trigger and I got ready to take whatever comes. Just them, at that moment, as I was about to fire, the guys on the Land Rovers arrived, a Godsend. They drove through the pride of lions, causing enough confusion for us to jump on the vehicles. We broke out of the death trap, and, as we turned into the road, we came across three big male lions, probably waiting for their breakfast that cold, dark morning, which would have been us.

Thus far, that was the closest I ever came to death.

Eventually I came across convincing evidence that my one friend and my boss were shooting lions and smuggling the horns. At that time the smugglers were paying more than a million Rand for one horn and it is probably much more by now, so it is a huge temptation. I heard that some of the soldiers who are working in the Kruger National Park are also involved in the trafficking, as are some of the rangers, the veterinarians, and there are even rumours that some ministers are making money out of it, so it is a corrupt, sinister, and murky world, where you do not know who you can trust, so I left.

Afterwards I told my tale to people who work in crime intelligence and presented the evidence that we found to them so that they can investigate further. I don’t know if anything came of it, but ultimately it is the animals who suffer the most, and I am not sure we will have rhinos for much longer.

Let’s hope we can end the madness before these magnificent creatures become extinct.

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