The Wilderness Family
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
When Kobie Krüger, her game-ranger husband and their three young daughters moved to one of the most isolated corners of the world - a remote ranger station in the Mahlangeni region of South Africa's vast Kruger National Park - she might have worried that she would become engulfed with loneliness and boredom. Yet, for Kobie and her family, the seventeen years spent in this spectacularly beautiful park proved to be the most magical - and occasionally the most hair-raising - of their lives.
Kobie recounts their enchanting adventures and extraordinary experiences in this vast reserve - a place where, bathed in golden sunlight, hippos basked in the glittering waters of the Letaba River, storks and herons perched along the shoreline, and fruit bats hung in the sausage trees.
But as the Krugers settled in, they discovered that not all was peace and harmony. They soon became accustomed to living with the unexpected: the sneaky hyenas who stole blankets and cooking pots, the sinister-looking pythons that slithered into the house, and the usually placid elephants who grew foul-tempered in the violent heat of the summer. And one terrible day, a lion attacked Kobus in the bush and nearly killed him.
Yet nothing prepared the Krugers for their greatest adventure of all, the raising of an orphaned prince, a lion cub who, when they found him, was only a few days old and on the verge of death. Reared on a cocktail of love and bottles of fat-enriched milk, Leo soon became an affectionate, rambunctious and adored member of the fmaily. It is the rearing of this young king, and the hilarious endeavours to teach him to become a 'real' lion who could survive with his own kind in the wild, that lie at the heart of this endearing memoir. It is a memoir of a magical place and time that can never be recaptured.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A remote ranger station in the wilds of South Africa's Kr ger National Park provides the landscape for this memoir of the 17 years that the author, her game warden husband and their daughters lived in the bush amid the big cats and other exotic fauna of this idyllic region. Whether she's recounting a near-slapstick encounter with a creeping python in the bedroom on the family's first night in the backcountry, the nocturnal calls of a prowling local leopard, continual and scary confrontations with a grumpy hippo or a raging bull elephant's death charge, Kr ger's sturdy and unadorned prose is well suited to the book's natural setting. The animal anecdotes tumble across the pages, at a pace that will engage readers who enjoy natural history and plainspoken yarns; indeed, the book hit #1 in South Africa. Meanwhile, the adversities of a stifling climate, jungle diseases and ornery vipers provide grim balance to the more uplifting adventures recounted here. The land, its creatures and its unchanging laws of survival serve as mentors to the author and her family, and lead the reader toward deeper insights about life beyond the furthest reaches of civilization. For instance, the poignant episode of raising an orphan lion cub into adulthood becomes a lesson in responsibility, freedom and loss for the girls and their mother. The wilderness depicted in this book, is by turns, a demanding teacher and a provider of wondrous gifts. Illus. and photos not seen by PW.