ELEPHANT HUNTING 227 



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 lioness. 

 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 with 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 lions. All 

 three, by the way, informed me that the actual biting caused 

 them at the moment no pain whatever; 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 the camps. A 

 safari which had come in from the 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 buffalo (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 Government House, I met 

 a government official who had once succeeded in driving 

 into a corral seventy zebras, including more stallions than 



