54 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES chap. 



land, a short time after I had left it, and, not being 

 able to make its way into any of the huts through 

 the small doorways, all of which had been very 

 carefully barricaded, climbed on the roof of one of 

 them, and tearing away the grass thatching, forced 

 its way in from the top. There were three or four 

 women inside the hut, and it killed them all ; but, 

 having gorged itself, was apparently unable to make 

 its escape through the roof again, and was speared 

 to death by the men of the village the next morning 

 through the framework of the hut, after the mud 

 plaster had been removed in places. 



A native servant of my own, whom I had left 

 behind in this village, was present when this lion 

 was killed, and he told me that, as soon as it was 

 dead, a huge bonfire was built, on which the carcase 

 of the man-eater was thrown, and the fire kept up 

 until it was quite consumed. 



The most cunning and destructive man-eating 

 lion — probably because it was not an old and 

 w^eakly animal, but in the prime of life — that I ever 

 heard of in South Africa was one which once 

 haunted the neighbourhood of the Majili river, a 

 tributary of the central Zambesi from the north. I 

 gave some account of the doings of this bold and 

 ferocious beast in the course of an article which I 

 contributed to the pages of the Fortnightly Review 

 some twenty years ago, and as I have the kind 

 permission of the editor and proprietor of that 

 publication to do so, I will now retell the story as 

 I originally heard it from one of my own native 

 servants shortly after the occurrences related took 

 place. 



In the early part of 1886 two half-caste elephant- 

 hunters, Henry Wall and Black Jantje — the latter 

 for several years both before and after this time a 

 trusted servant of my own — crossed the Zambesi at 

 its junction with the Quito or Chobi, in order to 



