196 TO LAKE NAIVASHA [ch. ix 



twice on false alarms wheeled and fled at speed. At 

 last the leaders ventured to the brink of the pool, and 

 at once the whole herd came jostling and crowding in 

 behind them, the water gurgling down their thirsty 

 throats ; and immediately afterward off they went at a 

 gallop, stopping to graze some hundreds of yards away. 

 The ceaseless dread of the lion felt by all but the 

 heaviest game is amply justified by his ravages among 

 them. They are always in peril from him at the drink- 

 ing places ; yet in my experience 1 found that in the 

 great majority of cases they were killed while feeding 

 or resting far from water, the lion getting them far 

 more often by stalking than by lying in wait. A lion 

 will eat a zebra (beginning at the hind-quarters, by the 

 way, and sometimes having, and sometimes not having, 

 previously disembowelled the animal) or one of the 

 bigger buck at least once a week ; perhaps once every 

 five days. Tlie dozen lions we had killed would prob- 

 ably, if left alive, have accoimted for seven or eight 

 hundred buck, pig, and zebra within the next year. Our 

 hunting was a net advantage to the harmless game. 



The zebras were the noisiest of the game. After 

 them came the wildebeest, which often uttered their 

 queer grunt. Sometimes a herd would stand and grunt 

 at me for some minutes as I passed, a few liundred 

 yards distant. The topi uttered only a kind of sneeze 

 and the hartebeest a somewhat similar sound. The 

 so-called Roberts' gazelle was merely the Grant's gazelle 

 of the Athi, with the lyrate shape of the horns tending 

 to be carried to an extreme of spread and backward 

 bend. The tommy bucks carried good horns ; the horns 

 of the does were usually aborted, and were never more 

 than four or five inches long. The most notable feature 

 about the tommies was the incessant switching of their 



