Sneaky hyenas stole blankets and cook pots. A honey badger they nursed back to health rampaged affectionately through the house. It was the perfect introduction to the wonders and terrors that awaited her.Īs the Krügers settled in, they became accustomed to living in the midst of ravishing splendor and daily surprises. Kobie felt she had found heaven on earth-until she awoke that first night to find a python slithering silently across her bedroom floor. Golden sunshine glowed in the lush garden where fruit bats hung in the sausage trees hippos basked in the glittering waters of the Letaba River storks and herons perched along the shore. Kobie and her husband Kobus were overwhelmed by the beauty of the Mahlangeni ranger station when they arrived with their little girls in the autumn of 1980. Now, in The Wilderness Family, Kobie recounts the enchanting adventures and extraordinary encounters they experienced in this vast reserve where wildlife has right of way. Yet for Kobie and her family, the seventeen years at South Africa's Kruger National Park were the most magical of their lives. The heat was unbearable, malaria would be a constant danger, her husband would have to be away for long stretches, there were no schools or nearby doctors for their three daughters, and of course the area teemed with wild animals. Gregory McNamee From the Inside Flap:Įveryone warned Kobie Krüger that being the wife of a game warden at a remote ranger station in South Africa's largest national park would be an arduous move. Readers who come to this memorable study of life in the African outback will be duly entertained, and those who are planning a trip there will learn a thing or two about how to behave around genets, cobras, rhinos-and, yes, lions. Leo, whose pastimes included alarming unsuspecting visitors and staring at passing birds in the sky, takes center stage for much of this book, and Krüger's loving portrait is a warm rejoinder to Joy Adamson's Born Free.
Most affecting of all her encounters, however, is her long association with an orphaned lion cub named Leo, whom she and her family raised into adulthood. Among the animals she encounters in the pages of her memoir are enterprising hyenas who, for whatever reason, pilfer cookware and blankets a python that crept into bed with the Krügers on their first night in Mahlangeni Egyptian goslings raised by a proud but broad-minded bantam hen and the occasional ill-tempered elephant. In The Wilderness Family, Krüger recounts adventures and misadventures with the curious menagerie that shared her turf-and sometimes her roof-in the remote Mahlangeni section of Kruger National Park, which lies in the river-laced country between South Africa and Mozambique. Longtime animal lover Kobie Krüger got a little more than she bargained for when she married a game warden and moved deep into some of South Africa's wildest country.
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