114 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



was utterly unmoved by lion, leopard, or rhino, evidently 

 held this snake in respect, and yelled to me to get out of 

 the way. Accordingly, I jumped back a few feet, and the 

 snake came over the ground where I had stood; its evil 

 genius then made it halt for a moment and raise its head 

 to a height of perhaps three feet, and I killed it by a shot 

 through the neck. The porters were much wrought up 

 about the snake, and did not at all like my touching it and 

 taking it up, first by the tail and then by the head. It was 

 only twelve feet long. We tied it to a long stick and sent 

 it in by two porters. 



Another day we beat for lions, but without success. 

 We rode to a spot a few miles off, where we were joined by 

 three Boer farmers. They were big, upstanding men, 

 looking just as Boer farmers ought to look who had been 

 through a war and had ever since led the adventurous life 

 of frontier farmers in wild regions. They were accom- 

 panied by a pack of big, rough-looking dogs, but were on 

 foot, walking with long and easy strides. The dogs looked 

 a rough-and-ready lot, but on this particular morning 

 showed themselves of little use; at any rate they put up 

 nothing. 



But Kermit had a bit of deserved good luck. W r hile 

 the main body of us went down the river-bed, he and Mc- 

 Millan, with a few natives, beat up a side ravine, down 

 the middle of which ran the usual dry watercourse fringed 

 with patches of brush. In one of these they put up a leop- 

 ard, and saw it slinking forward ahead of them through 

 the bushes. Then they lost sight of it, and came to the con- 

 clusion that it was in a large thicket. So Kermit went on 

 one side of it and McMillan on the other, and the beaters 



