84. THE LAND OF THE LION 
the sun. And when, as now, the grass is growing, and the 
dew lies heavy after the night, they will choose some high 
dry ant heap for a morning conclave, and a needed sun- 
bath. All through this lower Nzoia country, the ant hills 
some of them of great size, stand thickly, and the game has 
a habit of mounting them and looking around. You see a 
level unobstructed stretch of green grass for a hundred yards 
or so before you. Then a group of ant hills, with thorny 
bushes in clumps of ten or fifteen yards in diameter, standing 
between them. ‘Then an acre or two of higher ripening 
grass, the whole forming an ideal stalking country, also a 
sort of place where wounded game may require some reach- 
ing for. It was through this sort of thing we had advanced 
very silently for a quarter of a mile or more, when another 
purring grunt sounded, not a bit nearer than the first. 
but as we were all expectancy, and the mule was away 
behind us, we heard it clearly this time and knew it was 
made by a lion. Almost immediately afterward my 
Brownie whispered “‘simba”’ pointing at a clump of bushes 
two hundred yards away, and [ knew that after long waiting 
I was at least within shooting distance of a lion at last. To 
many a man such a moment may have come as an ordinary 
one, but not soto me. Day after day for five long months, 
I had never gone out hunting in the early morning without 
hoping and longing to find myself face to face with the finest 
beast in the world; the lion of British East Africa — and 
though I cannot say that hope deferred made the heart sick 
in my case it certainly did make the hunter keen. 
One hundred and seventy yards in front of the bush we 
crouched under, a bushy screen of thorn stretched for twenty 
or thirty yards. Beyond that rose a wide low red ant hill, 
and round the warm sunny bare base of it, there seemed to 
be a buff coloured yellowish mass. ‘The intervening thorns 
hid the crown of the ant hill, and anything there might be 
on it was invisible to me, but the fawn coloured mass at the 
