LOVE LIONS ALIVE by Andi Rive

  Two things… 1)     1)   Is it not truly amazing that one can think: “oh... let me write down this thought”, and one reaches for a flat metallic item, opens it and begins typing to the world? 2)     2)    I am busy watching a cooking programme. In fact I watch every cooking programme that I can find. Yet I do not really cook. I do not have more than a camp kitchen and even before living in a tent, as my children will attest, I only cooked because I had to keep them and my animals alive. Except on special occasions when I would apply myself. The program I am busy watching is about chefs from different countries and styles of cooking. Every expression is celebrated. From cookie milk to crème Brulé. Granita, brioche, and springbok potjie. My mind wonders to my world (this being the world of lions and sanctuaries). I think about the respect shown between various chefs and styles of cooking. Pastry chefs nodding to sushi chefs. Sugar arti...

  I am sitting in my bed in my tent. It is still outside, I can hear the varying speeds of the pitter pattering of small critters scurrying across the roof of my tent and the floor boards of my kitchen deck. It has been extraordinarily windy for the past few days and the silent contrast now that the canvas flapping and branches scratching has stopped, has me straining to hear every tiny sound. I am alone up here (well as in the only human) because Line is on the Limpopo farm where she met Dr Caldwell and went flying off to vaccinate and administer contraception to our giraffes. Being alone after the windstorms, comes along with a whole multi-layered listening experience. I can hear jackal calling from two different directions, I hear aardvarks tuttering, I hear jaguars ratcheting and an owl woowing. The silence is enhanced by the absence of the inverter which I could not get started up tonight. I tried and tried with a tenacity I wished someone were around to witness, but I faile...

And all that Jazz... Jazz is a little cross breed of Staffie and Border Collie blend. She came from the Animal shelter in Harrismith in 2014 after her stray mother had been fatally hit by a car and she and her siblings delivered via cesarean section.   Jazz is 2 weeks older than Taai, but being a dog, and not a lion, she has always been smaller. The size difference was not as disparate though, when they were still two babies sharing a dog basket. Jazz successfully chewed her basket into pieces and then proceeded to move into Taai’s bed with him. She used her nips and Border Collie genes to herd him and stay on top. Sometimes she even sat on top of him literally. We would laugh at this saying to ourselves that it would not last as the lion outgrew the dog, but it lasted, even when Taai was a sub-adult, he and Jazz carried on as if they thought they were twins. They sat bolt upright alongside of each other on the back seat of the car, their heads at a similar level. They ...

You can be anything in life that you want to be. An open ended idea which gives everyone hope and kills them at the same time. What unbridled pressure? Oscillation, duality and juxtaposing beliefs accurately describe my personality. I am a really calm person at the same time as being in a constant state of anxiety. I wake up inside a cosy, snug fog of grey but within seconds my mind is abuzz with thousands of flashing images, my stomach fills with bile, poisonous panic swamps me. I dread the light of day. Yet I have found my passion. I love my life with lions. So there it is, the dichotomy of Andi Rive. What I am doing is really important stuff to the lions in my care, but it is also very basic. In fact, the daily drudge of life with lions includes …. - Fetching carcasses, cutting up carcasses, throwing cut up pieces onto the back of the bakkie, moving the pieces from the slaughter area to the storage area then either loading the pieces into bags to be frozen or applying supple...

Bolts are are being bolted and keys turned in locks. The people of South Africa are locking themselves inside their homes as of today. In our case it is a matter of zipping up the tent. I can hear the lions romping and running, their feet pounding on the earth the sound reverberates through the canvas walls. I hear two of them have a tussle, lion moans turn into a few quick growls answered by snarls. Lions do this, they have spats, the thing is that spats from large cats are more intense in sound than that usually heard in alleys. But it is quickly over and the snarls evolve into roars. The royal proclamation is take up by surrounding lions and within seconds, 6 of the lions are in full roar. The baboons answer in a frenzy of screeches. I can hear rocks hitting rocks as the baboons throw smaller ones down onto the boulders below. Birds of a dozen varieties whistle and sing. In fact, as I listen I am amazed at the number of sounds I can here from my lock down spot in the tent. There ...

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 Mo...