48 SOUTH AFRICA. 



stances warrant it a very reckless and dangerous 

 one to deal with offensively, and I feel confident 

 in stating this upon the strength of the evidence 

 that between 1847 and the sixties upwards of 

 eighty casualties, many of them fatal and all very 

 serious, occurred to white hunters, inhabiting 

 chiefly the Marico district and its neighbourhood, 

 solely attributed to the results of contests with 

 this despot of the plains. Since then accidents of 

 this kind have been rare, as the Boers have 

 annihilated, for the sake of their hides, the vast 

 herds of ruminating game which had covered the 

 bare plains of the Free State and Transvaal. 



During the period alluded to not only had many 

 lions fallen victims to " vile saltpetre " influence, 

 but, their food supplies rapidly diminishing to a 

 vanishing point, the surviving regal beasts betook 

 themselves to safer quarters in the northern and 

 eastern bushbelt, where it is very difficult to find 

 them, and more so to get a fair shot. Within a 

 short time the lions will disappear entirely in the 

 absence of adequate food supplies, as, what between 

 rifles and rinderpest, little game of any suitable 

 kind will exist. In my early hunting days, in the 

 bush country of the lower part of the Marico River, 



