66 THE LAND OF THE LION 
country do not compare with those obtainable near the 
German border, what a game list I have made out for 
this beautiful part of East Africa! I should have said that 
very large reed buck and bush buck are constantly to be met. 
One more animal I must name, for he is well worth taking 
trouble to secure — the African wild dog. 
There are lions from Mombassa to the Lake. They turn 
up often in most unexpected ways and places, and you may 
hunt for months in good lion country and see none. A 
greenhorn strolls out of his tent on the Athi, at an absurdly 
late hour for a sportsman to go forth, and walks on top of 
a lion, sunning himself, on an antheap. The lion is looking 
the other way, and the lucky greenhorn gets his first lion so 
easily, that he tells you “‘there is nothing in lion hunting.” 
I knew an engineer who has run up and down the Uganda 
railroad on his inspecting Spider, thousands of miles in the 
year. He has been doing it for many years. His train 
hands, on construction trains, often see lions and shoot them. 
A German professor looks out of his carriage window, 
sees a lion feeding on a zebra. ‘The train is courteously 
stopped, he bags that lion. Hundreds of lions have been 
seen from the railroad, but, my friend has, in all these years, 
never seen one. 
A young friend of mine found himself in Mombassa with 
a few idle days on his hands. He knew little about hunt- 
ing and nothing about the country, so he scraped together 
somehow the odds and ends of a small sefari, and hied him 
into the rough scrubby bush that surrounds that town. He 
not only saw a lioness, a thing most unusual thereabouts— 
no old-timer could have found even a lion’s spoor in the 
place — but he wounded her, and crawled after her into 
the worst sort of thorn scrub cover. She waited patiently 
for him there and—charged and mauled him? — not 
a bit of it! But most amiably let him finish her off. 
Emboldened by his luck, he did the same thing with 
