AN ORDINARY LIFE IN A TENT with a lion

I live in a tent on the side of a mountain. I built a sanctuary for lions in a place where there is no house for me. I have been up here for 29 months now.

When I first came up here, Mela was only 6 months old. She, my dog and I lived up here on our own. 

Odin the young lion about to get up to mischief

 
I borrowed Leon's caravan thinking I would use it for 3 months at most, but I ended up living in the caravan for 13 months until moving into a tent. I was already familiar with camping and very attached to the caravan as Leon and I often went away to beautiful places, dragging it behind us every where that we went. Many times when I had to work on the weekends we would only set off on a Sunday afternoon and we would pitch camp a few kilometers away from home on the Wilge River or at Sterkfontein dam for the night, only to pack up the canoe and the caravan at 6am the next morning so we could both get back in time for Monday work.

Once when we were in Victoria West in the Northern Cape, we booked ourselves into a room at a nice B&B, but we ended up parking the caravan right outside of the fully functional room and setting up our camp chairs and caravan kitchen out of habit.

In February 2014 Leon took me to his home town of Strandfontein where we pitched camp in the official caravan park overlooking the sea. It was fine and we had a good view of dolphins in the morning and the sunset at night. But it was a bit municipal with many neighbouring caravans. So we left our entire caravan set up standing just there on the site we'd paid for and we drove off with our well equipped 4x4. We didn't see another person for days as we moved slowly along the West Coast sand tracks, sleeping under the bakkie awning and bathing in water we prepared from the sea. When we returned to Strandfontein we found out that other campers had reported our absence and that security and rescue services had been notified.

Writing this blog in my camp

When I set up camp on the side of the mountain where I am sitting writing this blog today, there was nothing at all here and before I could stay here, I had to build an enclosed area for Mela my Lioness. On day one, Leon took the spade in his experienced but impatient hands and broke ground. He had been saying for months that he could only be happy when the first pole was planted. He taught me, Jan and my two Norwegian volunteers how to use the Grow Yster, a heavy metal digging pole used to loosen the earth before excavating with the spade. We four women all had to show Leon that we had mastered the way of the Grow Yster and then he took off at high speed to attend to more important matters whilst we stayed here on the silent mountain in the black burnt veld measuring out the distances between the 26 holes of 60cmx60cm we had to dig that day. I have to admit that Jan quickly excused herself to rather go and work in my shop in town and I attended to the acquisition of permits for keeping a lion in the camp leaving Line and Tale the police officers from Norway alone to dig and plant 26 poles. On day two they prioritized going to town to buy gloves.

The cooking area

The sounds one hears when alone in the camp...
- Insects. Hundreds and thousands of insects. Wizzing high pitched insects. Droning low pitched insects. Buzzing, clicking, chirping, squealing, zinging insects.

- Birds. Hundreds of birds. High pitched, low pitched, cackling, screeching, melodic, whistling, cooing, hooting birds. One can also hear their wings beating.

- Baboons. Generally screaming, fighting, complaining, or loudly proclaiming dominance whilst donnering anyone smaller or weaker than themselves. This all amplified by the cliff face which is the backdrop to the camp.

- Jackal. Every night I hear the haunting sounds of multiple jackal wailing as they call from one end of the valley to the other.

- The crackling of the fire.

- The waterfall like sound of the wind around the cliff face.

- Trucks in the distance when the wind blows from the north.

- Canvas flapping.

- Micah my Golden Retriever barking at all of the above sounds. And of course his bark instantaneously incites those damn echo dogs on the mountain who he in turn has to bark at in a never ending cycle.

In early October 2015 once the Norwegian girls had Mela's camp ready, Leon towed the caravan up the mountain track with Mela and me snuggly nestled under the canopy on the back of his bakkie. We climbed out into what would become Mela's temporary camp and, to date, my permanent camp.

Leon and I pitched the caravan camp right up alongside of Mela's fence so that she could be next to me when she was inside her enclosure and I was under my awning. That first night however, as Line, Tale and I sat at my camp fire, Mela keened and moaned and wiggled and squiggled and popped herself right through one of the apertures in the fencing and settled herself down on my lap out in the open. I was not comfortable with this as I was not yet familiar with the surroundings and anything more than a few meters from the firelight was foreign territory to me back then. So we humans decamped into Mela's enclosure. We moved the camp fire, a table, chairs and a tent into her enclosure.

Line and Clayton building a roof

On the day after Mela's breakout, we wrapped her entire enclosure in a second layer of fencing placed to overlap the gaps in the fencing. Leon, we realized, had bought the wrong sized fence. My Norwegians, Line and Tale, were not at all happy to have to repeat the fencing process. But there was simply no alternative so we got stuck in and worked. Leon brought Robbie from home to help and he also employed a young chap called LP. Leon sat inside the enclosure having a Saturday braai and dop while watching that we all wired the second layer of fence onto the first with just the right twist of the pliers.
Before heading back to his house, Leon bandaged my hands with plaster tape which worked much better than gloves.

My Norwegian volunteers returned to their real jobs in Norway a week later and Mela, Micah and I stayed alone. The three of us began venturing out further and further from the camp. It became customary every morning and evening for the dog, the lioness and me to walk or run circuits up along the mountain track, along the side of the cliff, down to Prayer Rock and then back to camp through the Ou Hout/Old Wood forest. The reason for this was that at 4.30am and 4.30pm Mela would go into play/hunt/destroy the camp mode, so I would distract her by running/walking/panting around our circuit to keep her busy.

On one of our circuits

During the weekdays' working hours Mela stayed inside of her enclosure up at the camp whilst I oversaw the setting up of the sanctuary down at the foot of the mountain. Mela was lonely and Leon would sometimes bring his two Labradors to hang out with her in her enclosure. Then Rex came into our lives. Rex had been in a car accident on the N2 and been rescued by some locals who couldn't keep him. Having failed to find his original owners, they gave Rex to Leon. Rex and Mela became the closest of friends and Rex lived with, played with and walked at Mela's side for the next 10 months.

My children asked me what I found to do to keep myself busy up in the camp day after day. I told them I pottered. I would potter about keeping camp, cleaning, photographing flowers, exploring with Mela, Micah and Rex and cutting away dead wood. I cut dead wood for days and weeks and months. I opened up clearings inside of the bush and relocated the caravan from alongside of Mela's enclosure to a sheltered spot behind the trees. Mela and the dogs slept under the caravan, sometimes Mela also slept on top of the tent part of the caravan where my bed was. That was until the canvas tore and she unceremoniously joined me on the bed.

29 months later. Mela now lives at the bottom of the mountain in an enclosure with Taai. I am now sitting in a cushioned chair on my sitting room deck. To my right is an open braai deck bordered by a huge boulder. In front of me is the kitchen deck and a fire pit area fringed by bushes. To my left is my bedroom tent with the bathroom deck behind it. This entire area is densely surrounded by bush. I do have a view of the cliff from where I sit, but this spot was chosen for purposes of shelter. In the early days I had thought to build my camp with open vistas over the valleys to the Drakensberg in the distance. But after the first full cycle of seasons up here, my driving need became shelter over and above views. It has taken a long while to reach this point as my own tent was always put onto the back burner while we prioritized lion camps and volunteer accommodation. Line and Tale, the Norwegians, came back and dug and planted poles until no one even counted how many any more. Everything up here has been built by volunteers who have come to work at Love Lions Alive Sanctuary.  None of them are professional builders, carpenters, plumbers or electricians. This has all been a labour of love. 

I live this life because I could not imagine living another

I live here because this is where the lions are. They are not here because of me, I am here because of them. I am privileged to be sitting here. To hear the sounds, smell the scents and to see and feel nature all around me. Insects buzz and birds tweet. The 3 lions who now live in Mela's old enclosures up at the camp roar and the echo resounds off of the cliffs and down through the valley.