In her trek across the continent on a promotional tour that has had her in 10 cities in as many days, Krüger has been eating in candlelit restaurants, staying in five-star hotels, and signing copies of Instead of the earth-shattering growls of the king of beasts, a close companion during her years in the wild, Krüger hears the whirr of cash registers racking up sales for her gripping book - a kind of
The Wilderness Family, a best-seller in her native South Africa and released for the first time in North America last week.
The bushes come alive with snorts and grunts and snarls that can scare a human half to death.īut lately life sounds different in the ears of Kobie Krüger, author of the Twilight is brief and darkness falls fast on the largest wild animal reserve in South Africa, whose vastness would fill Wales. A leopard nightly patrols the neighbourhood populated by elephants and hippos, baboons and lions and, in a modest buttercup-yellow house, a popular memoirs writer, her game warden husband and their three blonde daughters. 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.In a remote ranger station in a faraway corner of South Africa's Kruger National Park that slithers along the border of Mozambique, bushbucks and monkeys are regular visitors. Reared on a cocktail of love and bottles of fat-enriched milk, Leo soon became an affectionate, rambunctious and adored member of the family. Yet nothing prepared the Krüger 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. And one terrible day, a lion attacked Kobus in the bush and nearly killed him.
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. 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.īut as the Krüger settled in, they discovered that not all was peace and harmony. 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. 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.
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