Mhudi

by Sol T Plaatje

  The orphan cub was a female approximately five months of age, and came from an area close to the Sabi Sand Game Reserve. Her mother and two sibling brothers had been destroyed by the problem animal branch of the Nature Conservation Department for killing cattle in the Bushbuck ridge area. Somehow the official didn’t have the heart to put the little female down and so was pleading with us to see if she could be released in the reserve.

  This request came at the time when the white lion’s and her sister’s cubs were about four months old. The rangers had been out earlier that morning and reported that they had found the lions. So we knew the whereabouts of the two lionesses and their cubs at the time. Lying in shade out of the midday sun, they would probably lie up in that area for most of the day waiting for things to cool down towards evening. The situation and timing could not have been better. The venue for the release would be a nearby waterhole on the bank of the Machaton River, where I suspected the lions would drink that evening.

  The warden and his team arrived in two vehicles, the carcass of a zebra on one, and in a cage on the back of a second vehicle was the frightened little lion cub. We secured the carcass to a tree on the edge of the waterhole, covered it with magic guarri branches and then removed the cage from the back of the other vehicle. Everybody now backed right away, leaving only the warden to open the cage. The cub needed no encouragement when the door was opened; she ran straight out, passed the carcass and hurried on down the embankment into the soft sand and relative seclusion of the river bed. And that’s where we left her as we all hastily drove away. I remember feeling so sorry for this tiny, lonely animal, left to fend for herself in this seriously tough neighbourhood. It felt cruel, and yes, I did feel guilty for not resisting this ‘chuck it and chance it’ release … I was playing roulette with a life.

  Returning about three hours later, I was hoping to find that at least she had eaten some of the zebra, but through my binoculars I could see none of the small branches had been moved and the bait was untouched.

  It was now getting late; the sun slipped away behind the Drakensberg Mountains and, as it did, the temperature cooled measurably and the wind dropped completely. Except for the raucous calls of a couple of crested spurfowl as they settled in to roost for the night, the atmosphere was thick with an oppressive stillness. Although I was perched in a hide some 40-odd metres away, the ripe smell of the carcass hung heavy in the air. I remember thinking that if I could smell it, so would the lions. After setting up a spotlight, I poured a cup of tea from my small stainless steel flask and settled down to wait.

  I am always amazed at how quietly these relatively large animals can move through the bush at a normal walking pace. This time was no exception, and even though I knew the lions were coming, they are built for stealth and I heard nothing until the rustle of the guarri bush I’d used to cover the carcass as it was being removed. The guttural growls and snarls that followed meant they had begun to feed on the carcass. Allowing them a few minutes to settle down, I turned on the light which revealed that except for the two big males, the whole pride was there. The crunching and the munching as all of them fed was only interrupted by the occasional growl or grunt when one of the cubs forgot its place in the pecking order, even though there was more than enough for all of them.

  I watched the interaction between the feeding lions for a while, then gave them a break from the spotlight, not that it seemed to disturb them in the slightest. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for that lonely, frightened lion cub somewhere out there in a strange and hostile territory without the reassuring comfort of its mother. The picture being painted in my mind was not pretty; in fact it was downright depressing, until I reached for the spotlight and turned it on again.

  No words can describe what I saw next, or the emotion I felt when I did, but it was the sort of stuff fairy tales are made of.

  Unfortunately, because this happened in the dark and in a relatively short space of time, I am unable to provide a sequential blow-by-blow report as to how it happened. All I can say with certainty is that when I turned the spotlight back on, the number of lions in the pride feeding on the zebra carcass had grown by one! The impossible had happened and this orphan cub had joined the pride without hesitation or any sign of diffidence from the others! The big test was still to come: would this little waif be accepted by the pride males? We were to be astounded yet again, when a couple of days later the big males were seen with the rest of the pride including the new little cub. We were considering rewriting everything known about the social behaviour of lions, but realised this was unique, a one-off exception to the rule.

  The new lion was easy to distinguish from the rest of her pride mates and adopted siblings; she was a darker shade of tawny, almost a teddy bear ginger. As she grew older, we also noticed that her face was slightly shorter, more ‘puggy’ than the adult females of the white pride, which had an unmistakable ‘pink panther’ look about them. The white lioness and her sister were apparently completely blind to these differences, and treated the cub as if she were one of their own.

  Broad-based conjecture about this incredible phenomenon is that this adoption resulted from the totality of a complex and coincidental set of circumstances that would be virtually impossible to replicate in the wild. Firstly, the cub was about the same age and size as the adoptive pride’s cubs. Secondly, it was a wild lion that was used to competing with siblings for food and so slotted into the feeding ritual without arousing suspicion. Thirdly, the overpowering smell of the carcass and fatty nature of the meat would have imparted the same rancid smell to all the lions feeding on it, thereby completely disguising any strange or foreign scent. Fourthly, when lions are focused on feeding, very little distracts them, and it was this crucial timing when the cub made her approach that played the biggest role – though this timing was purely coincidental and fortuitous. Fifthly, the pride’s big males were not present at the time. If they had been, they would most certainly have dominated the carcass, leaving the rest of the pride waiting around for their turn. Not being engrossed with feeding, and with not much else to do except wait for the males to eat their fill, it’s difficult to imagine any scenario other than that they would have noticed the newcomer making an approach, and then, almost certainly, they would have attacked and killed her.

  Ironically this pug-faced lioness grew up to have cubs of her own and became one of the dominant females of the white pride. One day, about four years after her adoption, she and two other females attacked and almost killed two young male lions that had inadvertently strayed into the white pride’s territory. The white lioness had now proved she was a good mother, but the question on everyone’s lips was, how was she coping with her white coat handicap when hunting? Popular speculation was that her tawny sister was doing the majority of the hunting, but this hypothesis was soon to be dispelled.

  One afternoon I found the tawny lioness near death. She had been attacked by two strange males who had moved into the white pride’s territory unchallenged. The pride’s territorial males were at one of the landowner’s camps, where they had already been for a while. Here they would wait patiently, as they had been doing every day that week, for meat in the form of a giraffe which had been shot, suspended in a large leadwood tree known as ‘die aasboom’ (the bait tree), and then lowered by block and tackle each evening for the amusement of the landowners. They would watch the lions feeding and once it was felt the lions had eaten enough, the carcass would be winched up and out of reach until the next evening, when the same, slightly smellier ritual, was repeated.

  Without the support and protection of the pride males, the lioness had no chance. She was so badly mauled by the new males that the warden, who I’d called in to dart her and ascertain the extent of her injuries, could do nothing but euthanase her. The white lioness must have realised that there was no contest, and so, unable to defend her sister, again put her cubs first and got out of harm’s way. We were to realise later that this would not be the only casualty of
‘die aasboom’ and its destructive effect on the white lion pride.

  Now a single mother, the white lioness once more demonstrated her independence and mettle when she successfully raised a second litter of cubs, all of which were tawny. What was particularly important was that during the first six weeks after the cubs were born, this lioness was doing virtually all the hunting herself. Not only was she a totally self-reliant provider, but on occasion, would inadvertently provide for the pride as well. When larger prey was killed, she would eat her fill, and then when she went back to nurse her cubs, the rest of the pride would finish it.

  The controversy of camouflage as an essential adaptation raged on, despite this lioness punching big holes through this speculative theory. Among scientists and laymen alike, it was thought that a white predator would be unable to conceal itself or blend in with its surroundings. The ability to launch an attack or undertake a stealthy approach to within striking range was thought to be essential for the survival of a predator such as a lion.

  Therefore, it was concluded that a white lion’s hunting success ratio would be severely compromised by its contrasting colouration. My study, although by no means conclusive, found this to be unsubstantiated.

  One hunt in particular busted this myth good and proper, in my book, anyway. In broad daylight, I watched her stalk and kill a huge waterbuck bull, in spite of her white coat being in stark contrast to the dark green foliage of the surrounding mopane scrub. Her success seemed to have more to do with technique and maintaining a low profile, than relying on blending into her surroundings. It was also clearly evident from the healthy condition of her cubs that despite her colour, the white lioness was not only an excellent hunter and provider; she was also a highly functional, perfectly normal member of a wild lion pride. As time passed and she went on to raise more cubs it became increasingly evident that the colour of this lioness’s coat was no handicap. If there were drawbacks, they were easily compensated for with skill.

  Initial fears that white lions would not survive in the wild on the basis of their colour handicap was the prime motivation for their capture and removal from the wilds of the Timbavati to the protective custody of zoos, without being given a chance to prove themselves. This interference, born of well-meaning concern, created awareness and huge media interest making white lions world-famous for all the wrong reasons. They were being treated as if they were an endangered and threatened species; their popularity soared; the demand for white lions as tourist magnets sky-rocketed. On the darker side, exorbitant amounts of money were being offered by trophy hunters who were after something unique. This increased demand meant that somewhere, somehow, somebody would find a way to exploit them.

  In 1990, Alois Adlekopfer, a good friend of mine, who manages the farm Hermansberg in the Southern Timbavati, phoned me one evening to say he had just seen a white lion. My initial reaction was one of doubt, as there had been many mistaken sightings of what people thought were white lions but invariably turned out to be nothing more than a lighter than usual tawny lion.

  It was an easy mistake to make, especially when viewing in isolation at night, in the beam of an extremely powerful spotlight. He went on to say it was a young male, no more than twelve months old, and that it was on a zebra kill with another four tawny lions. Up until that point in time, except for the well-known lioness I was studying, no one had reported seeing another white lion in the Timbavati, nor were there any rumours of one. Furthermore, the territorial boundary of the white pride I was monitoring on a regular basis lay some 25 kilometres to the north, so it was highly unlikely that she could have covered this distance overnight. The most important factor was that the description I had been given didn’t match that of the white lioness – and it was from a most reliable source. It meant there was definitely a second white lion in the Timbavati! This was further substantiated when we saw a photograph taken of the lion alongside the contrasting four tawny lions. As exciting as this was, we were not to know at the time that the sighting of the young white lion was the last time he’d be seen in the Timbavati. As suddenly as he’d been sighted, he disappeared.

  Eighteen months later, one of the finest trackers I ever had the privilege to work with, Phinias Sibuyi, returned from leave with some news that was to shock me to the core. Phinias had been with me for nearly seven years at that stage, and his knowledge and understanding of lions – the white pride in particular – was outstanding. Without his tracking skill and sixth sense, I would have missed a lot of information that was gained about these lions. What he told me confirmed a suspicion that had been niggling at me since the sudden disappearance of that young white lion. He said that the taxi driver was going really slowly, picking his way along the badly rutted gravel road, so he was able to get a good long look at what he was convinced was a white lion inside the fenced area of a neighbouring property. There was enough time to point it out to the other occupants in the vehicle, who all saw it clearly. He estimated the lion to be about three years old. In those days, the road to Acornhoek went right through the Southern Timbavati and alongside this farm. To cut a long story short, this was the beginning of one of those so-called ‘Lion Breeding Projects’ where white lions were bred for commercial purposes.

  They were ‘canned lions’, hunted for huge sums of money, or sold to other breeders for the same purpose – ultimately, either way, legal in those days. Many of the white lions from this station were so inbred they were cross-eyed or squint, no doubt as a result of indiscriminate breeding due to greed and ignorance. I am convinced that all the genetic material was sourced from that one male! I can only leave to your imagination the question of how that white lion ended up on that property on the inside of a double line of electric fences.

  In 1992, another white lion was born in the Northern Timbavati, a female called Ntombi. She was born near the Shlaralumi River on the farm Java, not too far from where the white lioness and her sister were born. As a member of a large stable pride, with a strong coalition of pride males, there appeared to be little that could threaten this new little girl. Well, that’s what we thought.

  Despite vehement protest against lion baiting, it remained a common practice among those landowners terminally afflicted with ‘Myne syndrome’. As outlined before, they attracted the white pride onto their properties for staged viewing pleasure. They would use the carcasses of large animals, usually giraffe, and on occasion even donkeys. This grossly selfish act effectively denied anyone else in the reserve the pleasure and privilege of viewing those lions for weeks on end. While this was frustrating enough, the ecological ramifications were huge, and in the case of Ntombi, it proved to be as tragic for her as it had for her aunt a couple of years earlier. For weeks, the pride would hang around the carcasses provided for them, so they had no need to hunt. Worst of all, the pride males did not go out defending and marking their territory, which again led to new males moving in unopposed, taking over what was essentially vacant territory in the eyes of ‘lion law’. The inevitable cub infanticide carried out by the new males did not discriminate on the basis of colour, and Ntombi was killed along with the rest of the cubs in the pride.

  In spite of these unnatural disruptions, the white lioness went on to successfully raise a third litter of cubs, all of them tawny. She was now eleven years old and still going strong. As with any pride in Africa’s wild systems, there are constant changes and territorial shake-ups and shifts, and the white lion’s pride was no different.

  Eventually she moved into an area where regular monitoring was proving difficult, and weeks would go by without a sighting of her. It was while on these extended forays that she was caught in a wire snare probably set by the construction workers of a newly developed shareblock to the north of the Timbavati. Thanks to modern technology and advances in veterinary medicines, the snare was removed and she made a full recovery. ‘Whitey’ was just over twelve years old when I saw her for the last time, and I have no idea how much longer she lived, but I suspect it wasn’t fo
r much more than a few months. Nevertheless, with many tawny lions failing to achieve half that age, this was a fair innings for a white lion that was never expected to survive in the wild.

  The passing of the white lioness left a huge void in the area. Many of us who had known her would have done anything to have her back. Some felt strongly enough to want to replace her with another white lion from one or other breeding project. There was even talk of trying to reintroduce the white gene by bringing in from Pretoria Zoo a particular white lion called Naas, after you-know-who, and mating him with wild lions. An elaborate holding facility was constructed to facilitate this project. Complete with a feeding and monitoring system that would ensure there was no association or contact between man and lion, it was state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, although the facility was used on occasion to house lions for treatment of injuries until they recovered, the ‘White Lion Gene Project’ never materialised.

  Essentially I am against the reintroduction of captive-bred white lions into the wild. My main concern is regarding the quality of the genetic material that would be introduced into a naturally healthy system. Another is that it is tough enough for seasoned brawlers out there, and any captive-bred lions, particularly males, would not be ‘streetwise’. In my opinion, if you introduced captive-bred lions, white or tawny, into the Timbavati, you would be sentencing them to certain death. In any event, I personally prefer tawny coats and black manes on lions in the African savannah bushveld and feel that chinchilla coats are better suited to polar bears.