THE LIONS' LAIR 



about the game, and incidentally I happened to 

 mention what bad luck I had had so far with lions, 

 and how anxious I was to secure some really good 

 moving pictures of them. Hill seemed to think that I 

 exaggerated the difficulties, or that Fortune had been 

 very much against me. There were plenty of lions, 

 far too many of them, in fact, round his place, he 

 declared ; quite recently he had seen three of them 

 prowling about a small kopje in the neighbourhood of 

 his own house. 



Would I go out then and have a try ? Needless 

 to say, I accepted gladly. The chance was far too 

 good to be missed, and I knew that Hill was a man 

 who would not take me on a wild-goose chase. 

 Consequently, a few days later I turned up at my 

 friend's homestead accompanied by Clark. 



We had taken the train as far as Kapati Station 

 and had tramped across the veldt from there, a distance 

 of about twelve miles. 



The kopje beloved of the lions proved to be about a 

 mile and a half round and to rise some three hundred 

 feet above the plain. As a rule the lions' " lair " may 

 be regarded as a fiction of the noveHst, the lion being 

 essentially a wanderer ; but in this case that particular 

 kopje certainly was a lair for lions. There were 

 generally some of them there ; in fact, it seemed that 

 if one was shot two more came to take their dead 

 comrade's place. So far as cover was concerned the 



9 129 



