All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  Meanwhile, the lucky ones somehow snuck past the carnage. A hundred or so wildebeest made it to the other side, but with relief came amazing stupidity: they just stood there, so the next wave had nowhere to go. The soaking wet, steep riverbank may as well have been Teflon coated and the gnus started slipping backwards down the bank into the open jaws of more patient crocs, the smarter older ones that knew how to avoid kicks in the head. And on the feast went.

  After a while the crocs were so full they could hardly move, but there was still dessert to come. Half-eaten zebras floated past us as the crocs moved in for something a little sweeter, like a baby wildebeest who had no chance as mum was some metres away. Down he went. And right behind was another baby, and another croc, but this croc got a stab in the face from the horns of an ever-watchful mum. Go, Mum! They both made it to the other side. But there were still hundreds of wildebeest in the river, struggling through body parts and blood.

  Then suddenly the killer crocs, with an almost docile look, slid backwards into the deeper water and disappeared. So although Mother Nature didn’t do such a great job of designing each gnu, she knew there was safety in numbers. Most made it across the river and a few looked back at the carnage as if to say, ‘Phew, that was close.’

  I filmed the thousands of dripping wet, exhausted, relieved wildebeest dispersing into the vast Serengeti, the land of milk and honey. For all those that didn’t make it, Mother Nature would make amends, and there would be 350,000 new wildebeest born that year.

  •

  If it was Mother Nature’s failure in design school that created gnus, she must have studied extra hard the next year, because she also created the most beautiful living creature I have ever seen—the quintessential design, aerodynamically perfect, beautiful to watch, Istiompax indica or black marlin. Any plane or yacht designer needn’t look anywhere else. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ben Lexcen checked them out for his winged keel on Australia II. Maybe the face of the black marlin isn’t too pretty but everything else is a work of art. A long spear-like bill, a large slightly rounded retractable dorsal fin, small strategically placed fins seemingly everywhere and two keels either side. The beautiful tail looking sharp as a scythe. These super-sleek fish can grow to well over 700 kilos, yet marlin are harmless and very happy minding their own business. The top half is black, the bottom silver, perfect camouflage from predators above or below. But it does them no good. The black marlin’s only predators are the scores of very wealthy, overindulged, egomaniacs who hunt and kill them.

  One such killer was Lee Marvin, the great Hollywood actor. I was a real fan. I loved his movies The Dirty Dozen and Cat Ballou for which he won an Academy Award. He loved marlin fishing. He was rich enough and had a tough guy image. Admittedly he fought in WWII and was wounded, but the tough guy image came from Hollywood. Just another act.

  So there we were, doing a story on black marlin fishing on the outer side of the Great Barrier Reef with Lee Marvin. He wasn’t over-friendly but I must admit he had a great voice, deep and gravelly, probably due to the fag that was never out of his mouth. He had a perfectly trimmed white beard, a white broad-brim hat and solid sunbaked forearms. A Hemingway character if ever there was one. And, surprise, surprise, just in case we missed the obvious, as soon as we met him he started quoting Hemingway, straight out of The Old Man and The Sea.

  We were 40 kilometres offshore and the mega-expensive boat crew set up the hook, bait and line for the actor. The hook was horrendously massive. The bait, a tuna, was four times bigger than any fish I’d ever caught (and thrown back). As Marvin watched his crew setting up, Ray Martin asked him why he fishes for marlin.

  ‘I like the threat,’ he said.

  Quick as a flash Ray said, ‘What’s the threat?’

  ‘The threat is, that one day he’s going to get you.’

  So the poor innocent, minding his own business, can’t survive out of water fish is going to climb up the line and throttle him? And for once the actor wasn’t acting.

  In goes the line. A typical day’s fishing. Not a thing. Marvin gets to survive another day from those nasty threatening fish. But they’ll be lurking tomorrow.

  Back inside the reef, in much calmer waters and hundreds of metres from Marvin’s boat, we had our own 60 Minutes boat, with a wonderfully attentive husband and wife team looking after us. It was Shangri-la on the water. Before accepting our pre-dinner drinks, we went snorkelling. It was paradise, perfect temperature in the air and sea. Witnessing the reef and all its beauty, it was hard to believe people would want to come and disturb it.

  At dawn, having slept peacefully on deck, we rolled out of bed into the water for more snorkelling in one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. After a perfect breakfast, of eggs benedict and freshly brewed coffee it was back to Marvin’s boat to watch some killer fish threaten the Hollywood star.

  By midday he’d caught three small marlins, tagged them and let them go. He only wanted the big boys. The world record was 708 kilograms. Marvin’s best was 590 kilos, and he was here to break the world record, or at least his own. At 4 p.m., with boredom setting in, and very close to gin and tonic time, he got a strike. Marvin was as surprised as us. With his line rocketing away from the reel at lightning speed, the minders quickly strapped him into his chair. He leaned back as far as he could and using his whole body pulled hard on the rod, then he leant forward, rapidly winding the reel and gaining half a metre of line. Then he repeated the process. And on it went ... bit by bit. The fish must have been a monster. Fag still in place, more Hemingway quotes were thrown at us. No one had yet seen the fish, he was too smart, struggling for survival by diving to an immense depth. The hook must have been killing his mouth or, worse, his stomach. Often they really do swallow the lot: bait, hook, line and sinker.

  It had now been two hours. The quotes were slowing down and so was the old man. I moved in for ultra closeups of muscles and veins in his neck and arms. His hands struggled to wind the reel fast enough before the huge fish could swim away yet again. I was warned thoroughly by Marvin not to get too close, if I touched any part of him with my camera, clothes or body, his record catch would be null and void, invalid, of no consequence, and I’d be worse off than the fish.

  Luckily, for no particular reason, I went for a shot of the ocean and just at that moment this magnificent marlin leapt high into the air. He was waiting for me. He was well out of the water, and heading for Mars. On his way up he shook his body violently from side to side, his back a regal purple, and as he twisted and somersaulted, his silver gut reflected the late afternoon sunlight like a mirror. It was a great shot. He slammed back onto the surface of the ocean, and disappeared. It was five hours before we saw him again.

  It was now dark and I was struggling to even see Marvin. The sunset shots of the fish and the fisherman straining every fibre of their body really were The Old Man and the Sea. But now the sun had gone completely. Who’d have thought we’d still be fishing at 9 p.m.

  The boat had a powerful spotlight on the upper deck so I asked the captain to swing it around onto Marvin. Our old man was suddenly overlit and everything around him was pitch black. It wasn’t pretty but I had an exposure. Marvin continued to struggle with the line as the boat crew continued to flatter him, throwing encouragement his way. From that one and only sighting hours ago, the captain told Marvin it could be a record.

  Finally the utterly exhausted fish was dragged to the side of the boat. Mind you, the fisherman with cramps in his arms and back wasn’t looking too crash hot, either, but he’d had food, drinks, fags, minders and the help of a very powerful motorboat to get him to this point. We swung the light as far to the side of the boat as we could to try and get a shot of the dying marlin. The mighty fish, in one final heroic attempt to free itself, shook frantically from side to side, slamming into the boat. Then he gave up. I leant over for a close-up. He was still magnificent. Then, with those eyes gazing directly into my lens, I heard whack, whack, whack! He was beaten to death
with a club.

  That night on the deck under the stars I couldn’t sleep.

  In the dawn light we carted the carcass to a weighing station. It was not a world record, not even an actor’s record. The experienced captain would have already known that. Ray asked Marvin how he felt and right until the end, the actor performed.

  Roll camera, cue thespian. ‘Mythology tells us the hero must die. In this case, it’s which one is the hero, the fish or me, so I said, this hero doesn’t want to die yet, so I made the other hero die.’ Cue seasickness.

  •

  It took me years to get the image of that battered marlin from my head. And following the unbelievable hero statement, I happily filled my head with images of a battered Marvin. But over the years I moved on to more enjoyable and satisfying animal stories. White lions, baby elephants, giant anacondas, seeing-eye dogs, orphaned hippos and polar bears. All of them inspiring, all a joy to film, and all nothing to do with culling. Though the polar bear shoot went close. So close it was almost me that was culled.

  Day one of the shoot, and even now I find it hard to believe I did it, but it’s hard to break the habit of half a lifetime. You’d think the beanie, balaclava and gloves might have alerted me, but they didn’t. I blame the kids. When they were little I’d unlock the car, and holding the car key in my teeth, I’d place the kids in their car seats. The girls now drive their own cars but I still haven’t kicked the habit ... So there I was, in Churchill, Northern Canada, and as I placed the camera gear onto the back seat of the car, the key went straight into my mouth. But it was minus 10 degrees Celsius. The frozen key was now super-glued to my lip. I looked like Jaws from the Bond movies. Well, here goes ... I tore the metal from my lip, saw half a lip attached to the key and tasted blood. And believe it or not, I had done this very thing before, a few years ago in freezing Minnesota. Francis Bacon once said, ‘Assuetude of things hurtful doth make them lose their force to hurt.’ Well, I dithagree. It dothn’t. Thith time the pain wath worthe.

  My lip and I were in Churchill, on the edge of Hudson Bay, to shoot a story on the diminishing habitat of polar bears. Churchill had a population of 900 people, and 1000 bears. Thanks to global warming the polar icecap is melting, and with it goes the bears’ hunting ground. In the previous twenty years, 20 per cent of the Arctic ice had gone. It was well into winter now, and Hudson Bay should have been frozen but wasn’t, so the starving bears went looking for food wherever they could. Churchill, with its garbage bins, dogs and people, was a town under siege. ‘Never roam the streets alone, especially at night,’ we were told. The bears saw humans as a meal. I couldn’t blame them. We’d buggered their environment. If I was a bear I’d eat us for revenge as well as dinner.

  At sunrise (8 a.m.) we headed out with the head ranger in search of polar bears. Immediately we saw a monster wandering across the snow, heading into town. He walked with a slow loping gait, a swagger that looked as if he was listening to swing music on his iPod. He was magnificent, far bigger than I ever imagined, and he was on a mission. I was hoping my balaclava would stop him from catching the scent of my wounded lip. Our ranger, carrying a rifle for protection, radioed the bear’s position to a helicopter. A short time later, hovering over the bear, the chopper door opened and a ranger with a dart gun took aim. He fired, the bear went down, got up then fell again, struggled for a minute, then was still. The drug in the dart had already taken effect. I raced in to get shots of the unconscious bear and was shocked to see his eyes still open, but he was spaced out of his head.

  The ranger, three of his mates and our reporter Tara Brown, lifted the unconscious bear onto a blanket and onto the back of a ute. It was a struggle even for five people. This bear weighed nearly 400 kilos. He was tagged then taken to polar bear jail where he would spend the next 28 days with no food, only water. The hope was the food deprivation would stop him from coming back into town. But it didn’t work. There were many repeat offenders. And I’m on their side. I’d definitely come back to eat the bloke who shot me, gave me a huge headache and didn’t feed me for 28 days.

  It was time to release a repeat offender. Well, three, really. Mum and her two cubs. They’d done their time. Mum and the kids were drugged and dragged outside. The cubs were bundled into the back of the helicopter and mum was rolled into a net attached to the chopper by a 25-metre rope. I couldn’t figure why the rope needed to be so long. It wasn’t as if mum was capable of anything except maybe being motion sick as she swung precariously below the chopper 300 metres above the vast ultra-white landscape. We climbed into a second chopper with the door removed so I could get clear shots of her being flown back to the wilderness. The footage of the giant bear swinging in great arcs below the helicopter was fantastic, but without the door I was slowly freezing to death. I was wearing the best winter gear that 60 Minutes’ money could buy. Why hadn’t Armani discovered the secret of polar bear fur? The perfect protection from cold. The Eskimos had used it to stay warm for thousands of years.

  The bear’s landing was a little less gentle than it should have been. Mum was still out cold, but the cubs were coming to, and as they were lifted out of the chopper, one tried to take a bite out of the ranger’s arm. But the cub really didn’t have a clue where he was or what was going on.

  The three bears were placed close together in the snow. We were in the middle of nowhere, white as far as we could see, which wasn’t far. The freezing wind made you want to close your eyes. Not a smart move. We were inches from a very hungover, very hungry, very protective mother bear. We shivered and waited. We waited until the starving bears blinked and looked around. If we’d left any earlier, other bears could have attacked all three. Since the loss of the ice and food, bears had taken to eating each other, something that was unheard of five years before.

  We now had the makings of a great story, so when we hit town we jumped from the helicopter into our flimsy two-wheel drive van, hoping to grab more footage of bears before dark. Five minutes out of town, way off in the distance, we saw a lonely bear wandering in the snow. We headed towards him to get better shots. We were off the beaten track, but at least it was a track. We pulled up, and right there was the shot of the story. A hunting bear along the water’s edge. I jumped out of the van, set up the tripod and started filming. It was a fantastic shot. It told the whole story. He should have been out there stuffing his face, but couldn’t because the ice had melted.

  Instead he was forlorn and hungry, walking along the shore, gazing out across the bay. Suddenly he stopped, turned, and stared straight at us. Shit, he’s smelt my injured lip! These animals can sniff out prey a kilometre away. He was now heading in our direction. I got a few shots of him coming our way, said a little prayer to my very own god—the inventor of the zoom lens—and jumped back into the van.

  Let’s get out of here! But we couldn’t. The wheels were spinning and we were going nowhere. The bear was closing in on us and our driving wheels were now buried deep in the snow. We locked the doors and waited. I changed lenses just in time. He was outside the van. My window, the front passenger side, was open half an inch. He loomed up, shoved his big black nose in and started sniffing. I was now filming a giant angry, hungry head, six inches from mine. He left my window, loped to the front of the car and tried to eat the right side mirror. He had both paws round it and bent it at right angles. Not happy with the taste but watching us the whole time, he headed across the front of the car and attacked the left mirror. Still not happy he went for the windscreen wipers, tearing them both off. He turned and stared straight at me through the windscreen and his eyes said, ‘I want you!’

  I knew he could smell the blood on my lip, but I was the smallest there, the others were all much meatier. Micky was at least 15 kilos heavier than me, younger and more tender. Eat him.

  The giant bear came back to my side of the car, moved right up to Tara’s back window, and gently placed his paw against the glass. Tara put her hand up against his. Cute. It was an amazing shot. Suddenly he dropped
his paw and stood totally erect. All 3 metres of him leant back, lunged forward, and he slammed both paws against the window. Tara was inches from the window with nowhere to go. If that glass had broken, she was lunch. Bang, he lunged again. Bang! Bang! Bang! It was terrifying. We knew polar bears had been seen smashing through a metre of ice to get to their prey. Kabang, even harder this time, kabang, kabang, kabang. He was very angry and if he got to us, we were very dead. I was shooting it all and wondered how he’d react if I jammed a 10-kilo camera down his throat when his head came through the window. It’d be a great shot, shame no one would be around to retrieve it. Stephen, the producer, was in the back of the van, filming with a small camera. Hopefully his footage might survive. Micky was continuously tooting the horn, the bear was oblivious to it and, unfortunately, so was the rest of the world.

  Then, miraculously, our killer bear gave one last sniff, dropped to the ground and wandered away.

  Hours later we were rescued. Well ... shoved from behind by a giant bulldozer driven by a not-too-happy driver. We made it back into town for a medicinal, stress-relieving grog, served by a not-too-happy barman. We were then summoned to the not-too-happy ranger’s office. All that unhappiness was weird. Up to then we’d been popular in town with our friendliness and huge tipping. The ranger told us we’d been seen feeding the bears from our van and berated us for our stupidity.

  Where that story came from, we had no idea. We told him we might not look too bright but we weren’t that stupid. We told him the van was bogged, the bear was heading our way so we’d locked the doors and waited. He burst out laughing. That bear, he said, could easily have ripped off any of the doors, locked or unlocked.

  We remained unpopular in that town. I suspect they all wished we’d been killed and eaten, or at least culled. But we weren’t, and once again I had some amazing footage.