Steve & Me Page 17

  As Graham moved in, Wes knew the next bite would be to his skull. It would be all over. Wes braced himself for the inevitable, but it didn’t come.

  Steve reached into the water and grabbed Graham’s back legs. He didn’t realize that Graham had released Wes in preparation for that final bite. He thought Graham was holding Wes under the water. Steve pulled with all his strength, managing to turn the crocodile around to focus on him.

  As Graham lunged toward Steve, Steve drove the pick handle into the crocodile’s mouth and started hammering at his head. Wes saw what was happening and scrambled up the fence.

  “I’m out mate, I’m out,” Wes yelled, blood pouring down his leg.

  Steve looked up to see Wes on the top of the fence. He realized that even though Wes was wounded, he was poised to jump back down into the water to try to rescue his best mate.

  “Get out,” Steve shouted. “I’m all right.” Wes scrambled over the fence as the croc turned again to grab Steve. Steve and Wes both toppled over the fence and crashed down.

  In the dim light, Steve could see how badly Wes had been torn open. “Mate, I’ll give you a hand,” Steve said. “Let me carry you back to the compound.”

  “It’s okay!” Wes yelled through the downpour. “I can make it myself.” Both men pushed their way through the water toward the compound. No one else even knew what had happened. We continued working in the rain.

  Somehow Frank got word to the dingo enclosure. “You’d better get to the compound,” came the message. “Graham grabbed Wes.”

  I felt cold chills go down my arms into my fingers. Graham was a large enough crocodile that he could easily kill prey the size of a man. I struggled through the water toward the compound. This is a nightmare, I thought. It felt like a bad dream, trying desperately to run in the waist-deep water, and yet feeling like I was in slow motion, struggling my way forward.

  When I got to the compound, I was shocked. Wes was conscious and standing up. I had a look at his wounds. The gaping holes torn out of his bottom and the back of his leg were horrifying. Both wounds were bigger than my fist. He was badly torn up.

  We discussed whether or not to call an ambulance, and then decided we would take Wes to the hospital ourselves. Wes was fluctuating between feeling euphorically happy to be alive and lashing out in anger. He was going into shock and had lost a lot of blood.

  Steve drove. A trip that would normally have taken half an hour took less than twenty minutes. The emergency room was having a busy night. By now Wes’s face was somewhere between pale and gray—the pain was well and truly setting in. We explained to a nurse that he needed help immediately, but because we had a blanket over him to keep him warm, the severity of his injuries didn’t really hit home.

  Finally the nurse peeked under the blanket. She gasped. Wes was so terribly injured, I was worried that he would still bleed out.

  Steve and I were both very emotional. So many thoughts went through our heads. Why Wes? Why hadn’t Steve been grabbed? What kind of chance was it that Graham had grabbed Wes in probably the only manner that would not have killed him instantly?

  We realized again how much we loved Wes. The thought that we almost lost him terrified us. It was a horrible, emotional Friday night. Over the course of the weekend we learned that Wes would probably make a full recovery. He would keep his leg and probably regain most movement. There was still some doubt as to whether he was going to need skin grafts.

  Steve laid his life on the line to defend Wes. And as severely injured as Wes was, he stopped at the top of the fence to turn back and help Steve. That was mateship; that was love. It made me think of the line from scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Steve and Wes were lucky, for they were truly friends.

  We lost not a single animal that night. Every last duck, koala, and roo turned up fine, healthy, and accounted for.

  After three months, as Wes’s wounds healed up completely, Steve went to him with a proposition. “What do you reckon, Wes,” he said, “are you up for a board meeting?”

  They grabbed their surfboards, and we all headed to the Fiji Islands. Tavarua was an exclusive atoll, beautiful, with great surf. Steve and Wes also surfed Namotu and caught some unbelievable waves.

  One day the face of the waves coming in had to have been sixteen feet plus. Just paddling out to the break was epic. I didn’t realize how much effort it took until we had a guest with us, a young lady from Europe who was a mad keen surfer.

  Steve paddled out to catch some waves, and she paddled out after him. After several minutes, it became apparent that she was having trouble. We idled the boat closer and pulled her in. She collapsed in complete exhaustion. The current had been so strong that, even paddling as hard as she could, she was able only to hold her own in the water.

  I tried to photograph Steve from the boat. Peter, the captain, very obligingly ran up the side of the wave exactly at the break. I had a great side angle of Steve as he caught each wave. But the whole process scared me. The boat rose up, up, up on the massive swell. As the green water of the crest started to lip over the boat, we crashed over the top, smashed into the back of the wave, and slid down the other side.

  “It’s okay,” I yelled to Captain Peter.

  “What?” he shouted, unable to hear as the boat pounded through the swell. “What’s okay?”

  I gestured back toward the shore. “I don’t need such…incredibly…good…shots,” I stuttered.

  I just wasn’t confident enough to take photographs while surfing in a boat. I decided to be more of a beach bunny, filming beach breaks or shooting the surfing action from the safety and stability of the shoreline.

  But even on dry land, the rug was about to be pulled out from under us again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Baby Bob

  After the storm and Wes’s accident, we re-evaluated the safety procedures at the zoo. But the circumstances had been so unusual that night, there wasn’t anything we could have done differently. Wes wore the spectacular scars from Graham’s attack.

  The bond between Wes and Steve only grew stronger. I don’t think there is a similar concept in the rest of the world as the traditional Australian ideal of “mateship.” “Best friends” just doesn’t do it. Mateship is deeper. It’s someone who has your back, always and forever. If there’s a storm coming in on the horizon, your first thought is, I wonder how the heavy weather is going to affect my best mate? Your thoughts go to him no matter what happens.

  That’s how it was with Wes and Steve. Wes started working at the zoo when he was fourteen and Steve was already in his twenties. Wes backed him up on croc captures. It was a friendship tested and retested in the bush. Through the years both men had numerous opportunities to save each other’s lives. But nothing had ever happened as dramatically as that night during the flood.

  Even after Wes’s full recovery and the opportunity to unwind on a Fijian surfing safari, the close call seemed to set Steve back emotionally. The devastation of losing his mother and then nearly losing his best friend weighed heavily on his mind. Steve was not worried about his own mortality and was always very open about it. But the recent events only gave him more cause to think about life and death.

  “I can’t even think of anything happening to you or Bindi,” Steve told me. “I just wouldn’t cope.”

  Seeing Wes lying in a hospital bed made Steve so emotional. It never ceased to amaze me how tough Steve was on the outside, but how deeply loving he was on the inside. He showed his feelings more than any man I ever met. Years after he lost his dog Chilli to a shooting accident (a local man accidentally killed her while he was hunting pigs), he still mourned.

  During our nighttime conversations, we spoke at great length about spirituality and belief. Steve’s faith had been tremendously tested. At times he would lash out and blame God, and sometimes he would proclaim that he did not believe in God at all. I knew he was just lashing out, and I’d try to use humor to
get him back on track.

  “You can’t have it both ways,” I would gently remind him.

  When bad things happened to good people, or when innocent animals experienced human cruelty, it shook Steve to the core. His strong feelings demanded deep spiritual answers, and he searched for them all his life.

  Hearing the footsteps of his mortality made Steve all the more focused on family. We had a beautiful daughter. Now we wanted a boy.

  “One of each would be perfect,” Steve said. Seeing the way he played with Bindi made me eager to have another child. Bindi and Steve played together endlessly. Steve was like a big kid himself and could always be counted on for stacks of fun.

  I had read about how, through nutrition management, it was possible to sway the odds for having either a boy or a girl. I ducked down to Melbourne to meet with a nutritionist. She gave me all the information for “the boy-baby diet.”

  I had to cut out dairy, which meant no milk, cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese, or cream cheese. In fact, it was best to cut out calcium altogether. Also, I couldn’t have nuts, shellfish, or, alas, chocolate. That was the tough one. Maybe having two girls wouldn’t be bad after all.

  For his part in our effort to skew our chances toward having a boy, Steve had to keep his nether regions as cool as possible. He was gung ho.

  “I’m going to wear an onion bag instead of underpants, babe,” he said. “Everything is going to stay real well ventilated.” But it was true that keeping his bits cool was an important part of the process, so he made the sacrifice and did his best.

  Always, during both the low points and high points in our lives, if we needed to escape, we went bush. We were so lucky to share a passion for wildlife experiences. Tasmania, the beautiful island state off the southern coast of Australia, became one of our favorite wildlife hot spots.

  We so loved Tassie’s unique wildlife and spectacular wilderness areas that we resolved to establish a conservation property there. Wes and Steve scouted the whole island (in between checking out the top secret Tasmanian surf spots), looking for just the right land for us to purchase.

  Part of our motivation was that we did not want to see the Tasmanian devil go the way of the thylacine, the extinct Tasmanian tiger. A bizarre-looking animal, it was shaped like a large dog, with a tail and a pouch like a kangaroo. It had been pushed off of the Australian mainland (probably by the dingo) thousands of years ago, but it was still surviving in Tasmania into the 1930s.

  There exists some heartbreaking black-and-white film footage of the only remaining known Tassie tiger in 1936, as the last of the thylacines paces its enclosure. Watching the film is enough to make you rededicate your life to saving wildlife.

  With the Tassie tiger gone, its relative, the Tasmanian devil, became the largest carnivorous marsupial on earth. Any land we would purchase on this island state would have to include a critically important devil habitat. We wanted to make sure they would be with us for centuries to come.

  Devils can be quite comical little animals, intense and wild. The Looney Tunes cartoon character “Taz” is an exaggeration, of course, because devils only spin like Taz if they’re kept too confined. At the zoo, our devils patrol the boundaries of their enclosures, just as they do their territories in the wild, constantly checking on their turf and guarding it from potential intruders.

  The devil got its name from the sound it makes. When they become aggressive over food, devils become extremely vocal, screeching, snarling, growling, and hissing, making the most terrifying noises in the middle of the night over a carcass.

  Devils are under threat from a type of cancer called devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). It’s a shocking condition where the animal looks as though it’s been hit in the face by a shotgun. Huge tumors erupt around its jaws, and the affected animal eventually starves to death.

  DFTD is one of only two known contagious cancers in the world, and at this point it is contagious only among devils. The disease was escalating to the point where in some areas of Tasmania, nearly 100 percent of the devil population was gone.

  Steve was gravely concerned about the future of the Tassie devils. He was determined to help preserve the species by keeping a healthy population at Australia Zoo. This Noah’s ark approach would ensure that the devils didn’t go the way of the Tassie tiger.

  Amid all the work we did, Steve always managed to fit in some surfing whenever we were in Tasmania. One spot was particularly memorable, since Steve said that it was the best surf of his life. While Bindi and I watched from the beach, Steve could paddle out from the rocks and catch a right-hander that wrapped around the point for about half a mile. Instead of paddling all the way back out, he could hop out, join us for a cuppa, and walk back to the rocks for the next ride. Too easy!

  That winter we rented a cabin that we liked, built a big fire in the fireplace, and Steve told stories to Bindi in the evening. No TV, no video games, just the three of us together, with clean air and good surf. In the morning, we were up before dawn. Bindi and I scraped the ice off the windscreen while Steve packed up his boards, and we headed out.

  At the beach, we encountered only a few surfers. The surf in Tasmania can be excellent, but the water is bitterly cold. Steve enjoyed the fact that there were never big crowds, and the locals who braved the water were always lovely people. We would all share lunch and some great stories.

  I was an avid reader of Surf Life magazine, and I was surprised to discover a write-up of our Tasmanian visit. It made me proud to read how impressed those guys were with Steve’s surfing abilities. One incident that didn’t make the article was when Steve came partway to shore while I watched him from the beach. All of a sudden he stripped off his wet suit. It was winter and quite cold.

  “What are you doing?” I called out.

  He stood in the icy water. “This is how dedicated I am to having a boy baby,” he said, with a mischievous grin.

  I said, “I think you’re just supposed to keep them cool, not actually freeze them off.”

  He laughed. But I knew this was Steve’s way of encouraging me to stick to the boy-baby diet. Did I mention that I could not eat chocolate? The sacrifices we make for love.

  Our ongoing Hollywood education included the lesson that moviemaking is not finished once you actually make the movie. After that, you have to promote the movie, because if the audience doesn’t show up, all your hard work is a bit pointless.

  But before we could sell Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course to audiences, we had to sell it to the theater owners who were going to show it to the public. So the first stop for our promotional efforts was a gathering of movie theater exhibitors called Show West, in Las Vegas. We would team up there with Bruce Willis, who had an interest in producing our movie.

  Bindi and I had been in Oregon for a few days, visiting family, and we planned to catch up with Steve in Las Vegas. But she and I had an ugly incident at the airport when we arrived. A Vegas lowlife approached us, his hat pulled down, big sunglasses on his face, and displaying some of the worst dentistry I’ve ever seen.

  He leered at us, obviously drunk or crazy, and tried to kiss me. I backed off rapidly and looked for Steve. I knew I could rely on him to take care of any creep I encountered.

  Then it dawned on me: The creep was Steve. In order to move around the airport without anyone recognizing him, he put on false teeth and changed his usual clothes. I didn’t recognize my own husband out of his khakis.

  I burst out laughing. Bindi was wide-eyed. “Look, it’s your daddy.” It took her a while before she was sure.

  Our Show West presentation featured live wildlife, organized wonderfully by Wes. Bruce Willis spoke. “I sometimes play an action hero myself,” he said, “but you’ll see that Steve is a real-life action hero.”

  Bindi brought a ball python out on stage. Backstage, she and Bruce hit it off. He has three daughters of his own, and he immediately connected with Bindi. They wound up playing with the lion cubs and the other animals that Wes had organized t
here.

  We embarked on a twelve-city North American promotion tour, and then hit London, Dublin, and Glasgow. To buzz us around, MGM provided the corporate jet, with a crocodile painted on the side. It was a whirlwind tour. Bindi would get into a limousine in one city, we would carry her sleeping onto the plane, and then she would wake up in a limousine in a different city. It was nonstop.

  My sister Bonnie came with us to care for Bindi while Steve and I did interviews, one after another, from the morning shows to late-night television. We spoke as well with reporters from newspapers, magazines, and radio programs. Over the course of six weeks, we did twelve hundred interviews.

  Our publicist, Andrew Bernstein, gave Steve one of his favorite compliments. “I’ve never seen anybody promote a movie harder,” he said, “except maybe Tom Cruise.”

  Steve and Andrew hit it off quite well, but Steve was concerned that Andrew was single and didn’t have a girlfriend. “Come out with me,” Steve said to Andrew one evening on the plane. “We can go clubbing, and I’ll make sure you have a great time.”

  Steve added with a laugh, “You know, Andrew, for some reason chicks really dig me. I don’t know why, since I’m such a big ugly bloke, but they will come up and talk to me. Mate, I can pull you chicks, no problem at all.”

  “Steve,” Andrew said as gently as he could, “I like women, but I don’t like women.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Steve blustered on, still not getting it. “We’ll have a great time.”

  Andrew got up to use the restroom on the plane. I leaned over to Steve. “Andrew is trying to tell you that he’s gay,” I said.

  Steve’s eyes got really big. As soon as Andrew stepped out of the restroom, Steve piped up. “Andrew, don’t worry about it, blokes love me. We’ll go out and I’ll get you blokes.”

  I just about died from embarrassment. But Andrew laughed, and then we all started laughing. Andrew and Steve ended up becoming fast friends.