The Wilderness Family

When Kobie Krüger, her game-ranger husband and their three young daughters moved to one of the most isolated corners of the world - a remote ranger station in South Africa's vast Kruger National Park - she might have worried that she would become engulfed with loneliness and boredom. Yet the seventeen years spent in this spectacularly beautiful park proved to be the most magical of their lives.

Kobie recounts their adventures in this vast reserve - a place where hippos basked in the waters of the Letaba River, storks and herons perched along the shoreline, and fruit bats hung in the sausage trees.But not all was peace and harmony. The Krügers soon became accustomed to the sneaky hyenas who stole blankets and cooking pots, the pythons that slithered into the house, and the usually placid elephants who grew foul-tempered in the violent heat of the summer. And one terrible day, a lion attacked Kobus in the bush and nearly killed him.

Yet nothing prepared the Krügers for their greatest adventure of all, the raising of a lion cub who, when they found him, was on the verge of death. It is the rearing of this orphaned prince, and their moving endeavours to tach him to become a 'real' lion who could survive with his own kind in the wild, that lie at the heart of The Wilderness Family. It is a memoir of an enchanting place and time that can never be recaptured.