Kobie Kruger

The Wilderness Family: At Home with Africa’s Wildlife by Kobie Kruger details her family’s life living in the Kruger National Park of South Africa where her husband was a game warden. Over the course of his career, they were stationed in various parts of the park from the remote northern reaches at Mahlangeni to the more populated southern areas of Crocodile Bridge and Pretorius Kop. As a game warden, her husband had many opportunities to bring home orphaned wildlife which the family would then raise and return to it’s natural habitat. At various times they raised a honey badger, a civet and a genet (a cat-like creature of the mongoose family). This way of life also brought them in contact with most of Africa’s animals including hippos, elephants, and lions.

In fact, it was an orphaned lion that really won their hearts. Brought into their home when he was just days old, christened Leo by their daughters, this hand raised lion became the center of their world, and his care and love toward his “family” was truly amazing. When it came time for Leo to find himself a real lion family, they were fortunate to be able to place him in a wildlife park in Zimbabwe where he lives out his life in a large area with two wives and children of his own.

Kobie Kruger writes in a warm, chatty style that makes you feel you are reading a letter from a close friend. She has lived an interesting and unusual life, faced many difficulties from spitting cobras in her garden, to crossing cranky hippo infested rivers, and done so with style and good humor. A fascinating life that I enjoyed reading about very much.… (more)

This book was written by a woman whose husband was a game ranger in a national park in South Africa, and it’s a description of their lives with their three young daughters in an isolated corner of the park (the girls attended a boarding school during the week as they got older). The only car road was across the river from their house, no bridge, so they had to take a boat across a river full of hippos who thought of the boat as a stranger hippo-esque animal invading their territory and tried to rock it. So Mrs. Kruger had to shoot in the water in front of approaching hippos, so as not to wound them but to discourage them from coming too close, while her husband rowed. Their house was surrounded by a high fence, but sometimes local elephants managed to break it in their search of fruit, and sometimes big snakes found their way into their house through plumbing. They also purposefully befriended a variety of animals, from three warthogs to an orphaned male lion cub whom they raised and later released into the wild. Once Mr. Kruger was attacked by a (different) wounded lion whom he was tracking down and he barely escaped a leg amputation. And yet the book has an Eden-like atmosphere, and the Krugers lived there for seventeen mostly happy years – in fact, they both gave up their city jobs to live there, although they lost in terms of money.… (more)