The Life of a Leopard

Oct. 12, 2007 — -- Documentary filmmakers Beverly and Dereck Joubert started following the leopard cub when she was just eight days old. Odds were high that she would not live to be much older.

Predators had killed the previous cubs her mother had given birth to. Crossing their fingers, hoping for the best, the Jouberts began to film.

"She moves in a 10 square mile area," says Dereck Joubert. "I remember one time we tracked her one day for nine hours before we found her, and that was footprint by footprint."

The bush trackers named the young cat "Legadema" (pronounced LACH-Ah-DEE-Ma), which means "light from the sky." She got her name during a storm when she was about 6 months old. The Jouberts thought their young subject would associate the crashing lighting with them, but instead left alone while her mother was out hunting, the frightened leopard ran to the Joubert's truck and settled down next to it. Legadema. Lightning.

"We got very close to her a lot of the time," Dereck says. "Or rather the other way around -- she got close to us. Now it's turned into a bit of a ritual a greeting where she'll come up and go underneath the vehicle and maybe sleep underneath the vehicle for hours at a time."

The Jouberts followed Legadema for three perilous years. Lions travel in "prides" -- large family groups that live and hunt together -- but leopards are basically solitary animals. In the film, the Jouberts describe them as running a "gauntlet of death every day." By the standards of other big cats, leopards are small, so they are both hunter and prey. It did get to her, admits Beverly Joubert.

"It was like being surrogate parents," she says. "So I took on the role and whenever I saw potential danger coming I had to grab a homeopathic remedy that would calm me down, because I would start to shake and I couldn't take any photographs."

Still, there is a line the award-winning husband and wife team will not cross. They made a rule 25 years ago when they started filming African wildlife that they would not interfere with nature.