224 ELEPHANT HUNTING [ch. x 



and galloped after them, followed by Judd, seventy or 

 eighty yards behind. One lioness stopped and crouched 

 under a bush, let Selous pass, and then charged Judd. 

 She was right alongside him, and he fired from the hip ; 

 the bullet went into her eye. His horse jumped and 

 swerved at the shot, throwing him off, and he found 

 himself sitting on the ground, not three yards from the 

 dead honess. Nothing more was seen of the other. 



Continually I met men with experiences in their past 

 lives which showed how close the country was to those 

 primitive conditions in which warfare witli wild beasts 

 was one of the main features of man's existence. At 

 one dinner my host and two of my fellow-guests had 

 been within a year or eighteen months severely mauled 

 by Hons. All three, by the way, informed me that the 

 actual biting caused them at the moment no pain what- 

 ever ; the pain came later. On meeting Harold Hill, 

 my companion on one of my Kapiti Plains lion hunts, 

 I found that since I had seen him he had been roughly 

 handled by a dying leopard. The Government had just 

 been obliged to close one of the trade routes to native 

 caravans because of the ravages of a man-eating lion, 

 which carried men away from tlie camps. A safari 

 which had come in from tlie north had been charged by 

 a rhino, and one of the porters tossed and killed, the 

 horn being driven clean through his loins. At Heatley's 

 Farm three buffaloes (belonging to the same herd from 

 which we had shot five) rushed out of the papyrus one 

 afternoon at a passing buggy, which just managed to 

 escape by a breakneck run across the level plain, the 

 beasts chasing it for a mile. One afternoon, at Govern- 

 ment House, I met a Government official who had 

 once succeeded in driving into a corral seventy zebras, 

 including more stallions than mares. Their misfortune 



