We look at each other hoping he’s joking, but soon we find out he is anything but.

FALSE ALARM

Arriving in the drizzling rain at the Gödöllő residence of ZOLTÁN HORKAI, famed as "Wolfman," we recall the recent incident that brought him into the spotlight. His partner had posted an angry Facebook comment asserting that poachers shot two of their deer, taking one carcass with them, while the other stag had run away and hidden before dying. However, the deer thought to be stolen returned home that same evening, and upon examination of the perished animal's body during the police investigation, no bullet was found, suggesting that the cause of death wasn't due to a firearm.

The Facebook post that incited significant turmoil turned out to be a false alarm. Despite that, Horkai hesitantly answers when we ask if he regrets the action or would do anything differently in hindsight.

"I'm sorry if we unnecessarily ruffled feathers, but even now, I'm only ninety-five percent convinced that the deer wasn't shot. A few days before the incident, I brought home a white stag, which I kept separate from the others, and it soon escaped into the woods. The morning I found the deceased deer, it had a round wound under its throat, on its brisket. I’ve hunted myself, I’ve seen such wounds, and I was sure it had been shot. Unfortunately, this wasn’t our first incident; one of my wolves was previously shot dead and another time, someone killed a deer fawn with a club and stole it. Both investigations ended without results. In the latter case, I received a call two years later that they found the culprit, but since he was underage when he killed the fawn, he couldn't be prosecuted. That's why I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, but friends and acquaintances insisted it couldn't be left alone. My partner put out that Facebook post hoping that with public support, we might catch the perpetrator. If word got out that our deer was shot and taken, anyone being offered fresh game out of the blue would become suspicious. But by evening, the missing stag returned, and so did the white one. It's possible that the white one came back during the night and inflicted the wound on the perished animal. On the other hand, it's also possible there’s a bullet even if the X-ray didn't show it. Either way, this case has been concluded for us."

HOME IN A WILDLIFE PARK

As we walk further through his property, resembling a wildlife park, I notice a skeleton half-buried in the mud within the wild boar enclosure. I think of those horror stories where mafiosos feed their victims' bodies to pigs, but then I see the elongated skull.

"That was a bear, not sure when it got here, dug up by the pigs. This place used to be Mafilm's animal holding facility from the sixties, home to the wolves featured in The Sons of the Stone-Hearted Man_ and the 1986 film Lutra was shot here. The house itself was built as a set, I've just modified it a bit since," explains Horkai.

Since entering the gate, we have seen a bear, a dozen wolves, as many wild boars, a deer, a cow, a bunch of poultry, and a guard dog closer in size to a bear than an average dog. Out of all the animals, only the dog seemed unwelcoming, the wildlife paid us no mind. Just as we reach the house, a chorus of wolf howls, familiar from films, reverberates through the air.

"So, you don't actually live here, do you?" I ask Horkai.

"Of course, I do, together with my partner," he replies, swinging open the front door, which a horde of dogs almost immediately floods out, nearly toppling us over.

"The Doberman was brought by my partner when she moved in; the rest were adopted," he adds, guiding us inside and begins his tale.

Nothing predestined Zoltán Horkai to one day become famous as the "Wolfman." His parents managed a hotel, and it was expected he'd follow in their footsteps. He studied hotel and restaurant management in Austria and the United States, with no greater knowledge of animals than the average school education. While he did have a great dane during childhood and excelled surprisingly at dog training, he attributed this to their unique bond rather than any special talent. However, the signs of obsession appeared relatively early.

"My grandmother read me a lot of adventure novels during my childhood. 'White Fang' and 'The Call of the Wild' by JACK LONDON fascinated me so much that I decided I would one day have a wolf. Not a dog that looked like a wolf, but a real wolf."

Like many kids, he dreamed, but unlike most, Horkai didn't give up the dream. Despite growing up, studying overseas, working in hospitality, and being called crazy by his parents and friends, he was unwilling to abandon his childhood fantasy even as a successful hotel manager in Budapest.

"I knew a Hungarian guy who had white wolves. I visited, petted a wolf for the first time, and then I told him, come hell or high water, I need a wolf. He introduced me to 'BEAR PAPA' JÓZSI KÓSA, who lived in Gödöllő, and brought me to where we are now."

"When I first came here, I was speechless: the old man had bears, wolves, wild boars. He told me if I wasn't afraid, I should go into the back room because there's a tiger as well. I'd never seen a tiger before, but I said if he dares to go in, so would I. It wasn't fully grown yet, about eighty kilograms, it immediately jumped on my shoulders and started tearing at my hair. And Józsi bácsi started arguing with me not to let it be, as it will get used to that. That's how we met."

Even though Józsi bácsi initially firmly stated that giving Horkai a wolf was out of the question, the hotel manager visited the facility so many times that the old man trusted him and sold him a six-week-old cub. At the time, Horkai lived in an apartment in the hotel. When he turned up with the wolf, it wasn't purely greeted with enthusiasm.

"My parents were astonished, then called me a fool. They were right, at first; I made a lot of mistakes. I thought a wolf could be raised like a dog, but that's not the case; they operate differently. For instance, it's too late to start domesticating a wolf cub after six weeks. It must get accustomed to my scent and being bottle-fed before its eyes even open."

As the wolf grew, so did the problems. At times, it would sneak into rooms during cleaning and tear up a shirt or clothes. Complaints frequently reached Zoltán and his father, who constantly apologized and deducted damages from the bills.

"My father once unfortunately for him told me to decide whether I wanted to be involved in the family business or with the wolf. Without thinking, I said the wolf. We had a major fallout, and I left."

FORTUITOUS ACCIDENTS

Horkai's career in film began by chance. A nature film crew in Transylvania couldn't capture any wolves on camera. According to Horkai, it's not surprising, as wild wolves have it in their nature to avoid humans as much as possible. A mutual friend talked to the crew about the young man living with a wolf in Budapest's Lidérc street. They contacted Horkai and asked if he'd be willing to help film some scenes with wolves. He was.

The film turned out so well, it was submitted to an international film festival. Insiders quickly noticed that a tamed, rather than wild, wolf starred in the film and requested Horkai's number from the producers.

"Józsi bácsi also asked me to assist him with a shoot around that time. We were working on an Austrian documentary about ÖTZI, the iceman. That almost ended in a disaster when one of Józsi bácsi's bears escaped twice, once in Austria, then again in the Bükk Mountains, during the compensation shoot for the previous fiasco. The first time we managed to capture the bear relatively quickly, but when I removed the rope from the sedated bear's leg, it swiped at me in a semi-sleep, nearly tearing off my arm. It hit an artery and blood gushed like from a fountain. Fortunately, we had a doctor on site, so I got off relatively easily. The second escape was more treacherous; we searched for days in the forest and eventually had to call for helicopter assistance to locate the bear. I vowed only to work with animals I've raised."

Horkai explains his film career began fortuitously in that the wolves didn't have to do anything unnatural in both the Transylvanian nature film and the Ötzi movie. While wolves can be encouraged to do what humans want, they operate differently from dogs.

"A dog is a domesticated animal, bred for centuries for specific purposes, with cooperation with humans in its genes. Wolves, bears, and even deer, lack this inherent tendency to collaborate. In the past, wild animals were trained with methods now considered unacceptable. For instance, tigers jumped through fire rings in circuses because they were more afraid of their trainers than the fire.

Such methods are beyond me; that's why I'm not a trainer or tamer, but an animal coordinator. This means instead of forcing the animal to do something, I figure out what's needed for it to perform what I or the director desires.

Once we were shooting with Nicolas Cage. The scene was a horse-drawn carriage and four horse riders attacked by five wolves. One person falls from the horse, is surrounded by the wolves, and torn apart. The director wanted this from the victim's perspective, meaning a wolf had to attack a camera, something it seldom does naturally because it knows it's inedible.

We solved this by attaching the camera under a tabletop, placed some food on the table, and released the hungry wolf. It ran towards the table, or camera, then jumped up for the food. I was happy we had the shot, but the director didn't like the final product, saying the wolf wasn't ferocious or fast enough. It was mating season, so for the second take, we placed an in-heat female on the table, and the male showed much more vigor. Still, the director thought it wasn't aggressive enough. The third time, besides the female, we also put a young male on the table. The male wolf ran distinctly more aggressively, aiming to clear his rival away from the female. By the time he reached it, I had already removed the other male to avoid a real fight."

Horkai has mastered such tricks not only with wolves, bears, or deer but even with penguins, or, if necessary, even flies. During one advertisement shoot, a group of penguins had to climb out of a fridge and march towards the camera.

"Close to fifty different animals starred in the ad: lions, antelopes, camels, wild boars, penguins – anything you can think of. We rented the penguins from the Netherlands; I didn't know much about them, just that they live in large colonies. I took a large mirror and set it up behind the camera. The fridge door opened remotely, the penguins stepped out, saw their 'comrades' across the studio in the mirror, and marched towards them without hesitation. We got it in one take."

In the other ad, the story was a fly falling onto a man's plate, he picks it out, places it on the table, and flicks it to the edge where the fly flies away. Horkai managed this by first putting a dead fly into the plate, picked out by the actor. Then he replaced it with a live fly that had been chilled in a cooler bag. The cold had slowed the fly, enabling it to be flicked to the table's edge, but by that time, it had warmed up enough to fly away.

GRADUAL RECOVERY

Horkai moves slightly stiffly, occasionally searching for words during our conversation. What doesn't immediately come to mind, he works around. For example, when talking about the movie featuring the Polish woman SIMONA KOSSAK, who lived with wild animals, he can't recall the word "bison," but he describes it as the large, furry herbivore hunted by the Native Americans.

The "Wolfman," who has shared his life with dangerous wild animals for decades, became seriously ill on the first day of a holiday in Turkey about a year and a half ago. A blood vessel had ruptured in his brain. He says that might have been the lesser evil, but then he contracted such a severe infection at the hospital that he has yet to fully recover.

"Something inflamed above my ribs, and doctors still aren't sure what caused it. I've had three surgeries, muscles transplanted from my shoulder blade through my armpit. I weighed eighty-four kilograms; I dropped to fifty-four. I don't remember the first two months, not even traveling to Turkey. They brought me back from there standing on my own feet, though barely able to walk. In Hungary, I was taken to the American route, the neurological ward.

When the doctor first visited me, he asked if I knew who I was, could I state my name. I had no idea but knew I was famous.

Later, when visitors came, apparently, I didn't recognize anyone and talked nonsense. Once, when my partner visited, I asked why nobody from Italy came to visit me at the hospital and where the three brand-new white Mercedes were that I drove into the yard. I've never been in a hospital in Italy, and I've certainly never bought Mercedes', but these things lived in my head as though they were real memories. However, when a German friend came by, we chatted in German just fine, my language skills remained intact."

Working with wolves and bears is challenging every day, even for a healthy person at their prime. The question arises whether Horkai considered retiring after his stroke.

"Of course I did, but I don't want to. I haven't fully recovered yet, but I’m getting better day by day. What you saw, the bear standing up and resting its weight on my shoulder, hasn't happened for about a year and a half. That's important. The bear has work coming up, needing to 'kill' six to seven people. We received a twenty-page document on his tasks; he'll have a lot of running to do as he'll be chasing people, then gets shot, pierced with arrows, and set on fire. There's plenty of work ahead."