MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH LIONS 79 
not mean that they inhabit them continuously. They 
roam about, following the movements of the game. 
If they happen to be working in a country where there 
is a cave, they will use it while in the neighbourhood. 
But a given band of lions usually stays in one place 
only a short time. The phrase “band of lions” is 
perhaps not very accurate. Lions go in all kinds of 
combinations of numbers. There is a cave on the 
MacMillan ranch near Nairobi from which sixteen 
lions have been seen to come. Personally I have 
never seen more than eight lions together, but I have 
seen almost all combinations of numbers, ages, and 
sexes below that number. Lions are more often in 
twos, threes, or fours than in other combinations. 
But although I know that lions are accustomed 
to roam after game, one of the most interesting lion . 
encounters I ever had came from acting on exactly 
the opposite theory. 
There is a place where a little stream flows into the 
Theba River, where, in 1906, I was looking for buffalo 
and heard the snarling of two lions. We stopped the 
buffalo hunt momentarily to locate the lions. We 
started at the river bank to drive up the small stream 
toward the higher land and the open. The beaters 
began their work with their usual noises, which I 
checked as soon as possible for fear that the lions 
would go out too far ahead of us to get a shot. I 
instructed the beaters to go up the little stream with 
the cover along its banks throwing stones in ahead of 
them. But my precautions were too late. They had 
hardly started to work when I noticed on the hills 
