SPOTTED HY.-ENA 451 



east African ' low-country/ but were formerly common on the plateaus, 

 at an elevation of 5000 feet. Nocturnal in their habits, they leave 

 their lairs when the shades of evening close in, and retire at dawn. 

 They seldom leave beaten tracks or footpaths, and will travel to and 

 fro along the same line night after night. Their lairs are made in 

 thorn -thickets, under steep banks or in deep grassy hollows, and 

 sometimes in holes in rocks. Rarely they resort to burrows, but the 

 female, when parturient, always retires to such a spot. Hyaenas are 

 gregarious, and troops of six or eight are common, while I have seen 

 nineteen together. Personally I have never observed them seize and 

 kill wild game, though natives say that they sometimes do so ; but 

 that they kill goats, donkeys, and even cattle, is certain. Usually, 

 however, they confine their attention to wounded animals, or carcases 

 which lions have secured ; in the latter case, their greed often incurring 

 summary punishment at the claws and teeth of the lions. It is no 

 fable that hysenas watch vultures and thus find the carcases of animals, 

 for I have seen them ' sloping ' along, gazing skyward, intent only 

 upon the direction of their fellow-scavengers' flight. On one occasion 

 I shot a hyaena thus engaged, which proved to be one wounded a 

 fortnight previously at my camp, half its lower jaw being blown away 

 with a 10- bore charge of buck-shot; it was, however, fat and 

 apparently thriving when killed. Spotted hyaenas eat every portion 

 of a carcase — skin, flesh, and bones ; and leave little for a lion if they 

 find a ' kill ' in his absence. They can crack almost any bone with 

 their powerful jaws ; and what they cannot thus dispose of, they 

 bolt with a wry face and a gulp. This is the reason lions kill so 

 frequently ; and their occasional failure to return to the carcase 

 is probably due to their having been so frequently robbed by hyaenas 

 that they instinctively know how useless it is to revisit the spot. At 

 night hyaenas approach a carcase very cautiously, for they are terrible 

 cowards, and stand looking at it and walking round it for half an hour 

 before they venture to seize, perhaps, a ' length ' of entrails, and rush off 

 with it as far as possible, then work back on it, devouring it inch by inch, 

 till eventually they become satisfied that no hidden danger threatens. 

 When hungry — which must be often — they are very bold, and I have 

 known native children carried off from the huts ; while adults are 

 sometimes seriously bitten, the cheek or the buttocks being usually- 

 seized and torn off. I have known these brutes to enter a camp and 

 chew off the rienis (by which oxen are fastened at night) ; but perhaps 

 the most impudent act I ever witnessed was that of one which chewed 

 the riems from a stel (set-gun), so that the weapon fell and exploded. 



