180 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



boldly ventured too near the killer's feast. Ordinarily a 

 vigorous lion has nothing to fear from hyenas, and pays no 

 heed to them; but hyenas are powerful brutes and, in spite 

 of being normally abject cowards, they possess a latent 

 ferocity which when they are in sufficient numbers at times 

 renders them foes to be feared. Once Donaldson Smith, 

 watching from a thorn boma at night, saw a regular pitched 

 battle between several lions and a big mob of hyenas, in 

 which the latter got rather the best of it. On one occasion, 

 while lying near an elephant carcass, with Carl Akeley, I 

 heard the hyenas which had been feeding on it throughout 

 the night become roused to a fury of noisy defiance by a 

 lion which approached the dead elephant a little before 

 dawn, uttering the moaning sighs so characteristic of a hun- 

 gry lion; the hyenas yelled, screeched, growled, laughed, and 

 cackled, and apparently actually bluffed the lion, which did 

 not venture to come to close quarters. Moreover, I am in- 

 clined to think that very old and feeble or badly wounded 

 lions find their normal ends in the maws of hyenas. On 

 one occasion Lord Delamere and one of his Somalis were 

 desperately wounded by a lion he had attacked. They had 

 to camp directly where the accident had occurred, and the 

 lion, also very badly wounded, lay in the bushes but a couple 

 of hundred yards away. Soon after nightfall the hyenas 

 began to gather round the wounded lion, and eventually 

 attacked it; the lion roared and fought fiercely, and a long 

 battle ensued, but in the end he was overcome and eaten. 

 The hunting-dogs or wild hounds also attack lions, and are 

 much bolder in doing so than are the hyenas. Mr. Paul 

 Rainey saw a small pack of them harrying a big lion, which 

 was skulking off in much alarm; whether the wild hounds 



