THE FLESH-EATERS 25 



lions even a troop of lions if encountered in 

 daytime, will almost invariably betake themselves 

 pretty hastily from the neighbourhood of human 

 beings. Many a starving Bushman, for instance, 

 gets his dinner by driving off the beast from its kill 

 and helping himself to the carcase. 



Lions consort usually in small family parties, 

 numbering from four or five to as many as ten or 

 twelve. As the young males grow to maturity, they 

 quit the troop, or are driven from it by the older and 

 strong male, and form alliances of their own. At 

 times a pair of males may be found in company, 

 sometimes a single lion or lioness alone. These 

 single beasts are more often than not old and cunning 

 brutes, which, becoming less active than of yore, 

 begin to hang about kraals and villages, kill cattle 

 and goats, and finally attain a dreaded notoriety as 

 man-eaters. Man-eating lions, by the way, have 

 caused no little havoc during the building of two 

 African lines of railway within the last few years. 

 During the construction of the Uganda Railway 

 two of these animals established themselves on the 

 line near the Tsavo River, and killed between twenty 

 and thirty of the coolies employed in the building 

 of the railway. They created a perfect terror, and 

 something had to be done. One of the engineers, 

 Mr. J. H. Patterson, tackled the business, and at 

 the risk of his own life destroyed both the man- 

 eaters. On another part of the Uganda Railway an 

 Englishman was actually pulled out of a railway 

 carriage and devoured. An almost similar state of 



