On the edge
In this extract from survivalist Megan Hine’s memoir, she recounts the experience of getting up close and personal with three hungry lions
Survivalist Megan Hine’s encounter with lions
Iwas filming a TV show in Namibia when I experienced the kind of fear that comes when you realise you’ve become a potential meal to one of the world’s greatest predators. I was taking an ordinary guy, Fabian, out into the desert for three weeks, with just a knife, a medical pack and a radio. Every day a film crew would follow us, and at night they’d make camp nearby so we were always in radio contact in case of emergency. We had a camera with night vision to record anything that happened overnight.
We were ten days into the shoot when we made camp near Brandberg Mountain, a dramatic feature that rises out of the flat desert. Fabian and I gathered an enormous pile of firewood before scraping shallow recesses in the sand to sleep in. I radioed the crew to let them know we were going to sleep but I couldn’t get through. They must have gone back to the nearest village for the night, but they should have stationed someone in range who could relay a message in an emergency. I didn’t think too much about it: it happens sometimes.
Even though there wasn’t a moon that night, the stars were so bright it never got dark. Once your eyes have adapted, it’s amazing what you can see in the desert and I simply lay down and looked up at the sky, as the fire flickered beside me, until I fell asleep. I love sleeping next to a fire. When you’ve not got a sleeping-bag, it’s your only means of keeping warm and I find you get into a really cool natural rhythm: every two hours it dies down and the cold wakes you up, then you put more wood on and blow the fire into flame before going back to sleep. It sounds disruptive, but a few days into an expedition it becomes a restful, almost meditative routine.
That night when I woke up the fire was still burning. I instantly knew something was wrong. I don’t know how – maybe the insects had stopped – but my subconscious had picked up on something and I had an adrenaline spike, as if someone had jumped out at me. I remember slowly rolling my head to the side and opening my eyes to see a big male lion about 50 metres away. Oh, s**t. I sat up really slowly and my hand was trembling as I reached out for some of the brushwood we’d collected. I felt my insides constrict violently. But very, very quickly the hot rush of fear left my body and my mind took over. I knew I had to be ready to react. I reached over and woke Fabian up.
It was then that I saw it wasn’t just one lion but three – a male and two females – and there was no mistaking that they were interested in us. They were pacing around, occasionally moving a little closer, but the fire was keeping them at bay. I looked at our pile of wood and hoped it would last until the crew turned up at 7am. A fire doesn’t need to be big to act as a deterrent. Ours wasn’t much bigger than a basketball, and although it was tempting to create a really huge fire to scare them off, it was more important we kept it burning for longer: if we used up all our fuel, that would be it. Fabian and I didn’t talk much. We stood back to back so we always had the lions in our sights as they patrolled around us. We had a really brief chat about what we’d do if they attacked: shout and scream to try to scare them away, with long sticks I had beside the fire to use as torches. We both had short-bladed knives and were prepared to fight for our lives. We knew the knives wouldn’t help us against such powerful predators, but neither of us was going to sit and wait to be mauled to death. What we didn’t talk about was that there shouldn’t have been lions in that part of the desert at that time of year. They should have migrated away, but increasingly climate change is altering habitats and migration patterns.
After an hour or so of watching them watch us, something really amazing happened. I went into a kind of trance, a childlike state of wonder, and started to think about how beautiful those animals were. I could see their muscles rippling under their coats, glistening in the starlight. There was something humbling about becoming prey to something else.
When you’re faced with such an immediate and terrifying threat, you find that your mind doesn’t wander because it can’t. You need every part of your mind and body to stay on alert, and somehow it does. I don’t think I’ve ever been more acutely aware of my surroundings than I was when those lions were watching us. I almost want to describe it as an outof-body experience, but it was more a case of never having been more present in my own body.
What I didn’t do was pick up the camera and start filming. I thought
I could still see one of the females calmly pacing around us and my heart was tight, like a fist, inside my chest
about it, but I didn’t want my eyes and brain to be focused on anything other than the lions. I suppose I didn’t want to film our deaths. Cats play with their food and that stuff goes viral. I didn’t want anyone who loved me to live with those images if the camera was left running. If I’m ever killed making a TV show, I’d want the footage destroyed.
Just before dawn, as the eastern horizon was starting to lighten, two of the lions wandered away, but I couldn’t tell if they had gone behind a rock, or a bush. I didn’t know enough about how lions attack: what if they were moving in for the kill? Was one going to hold our attention while the others attacked from a different direction? I could still see one of the females calmly pacing around us and my heart was tight, like a fist, inside my chest as we watched her staring
at us. And then, as if it was what she had been planning all night long, she walked off.
The odd thing was I knew she wouldn’t come back. My empathy for our surroundings had definitely tuned into something – insect behaviour, bird movements, I really don’t know – that made me sure the threat had passed. It was odd how normal it felt, and in the hour or so before the crew got there, Fabian and I got on with our usual morning routine without really discussing what had happened.
Needless to say, when they arrived, their first response was ‘Why the hell didn’t you film it?’ And then something really interesting happened. On survival shows there’s a rule that if it isn’t on camera it didn’t happen or people could make anything up. Even though Fabian and I had just been through that amazing experience, it was as though it hadn’t happened because we couldn’t prove it had. So we just got on with filming, and did the same the next day, and it gradually receded from my thoughts.
It wasn’t until several years later when, at the end of an interview, a journalist lobbed in a random question along the lines of ‘Have you ever been stalked by a wild animal?’ that the night in Namibia came back to me in vivid detail.
I now find it fascinating that something so visceral, which had brought me so close to death, could have faded in my mind during the intervening years.
Having analysed it, I think it might be for a couple of reasons. The first is, looking back, I wouldn’t do anything differently. I’m not wracked with anxiety about having done something wrong or criticising myself for stupidity. And the second is that, for those long hours on that starlit night, I was so perfectly living in the moment, so completely present, that when it was over, it really was over.