CHAPTER X 



A LION ADVENTURE AND A CHAMELEON STORY 



LIONS were once numerous in Angola, but 

 the commercial type of game- shot, the 

 merchant of skins, usually a Boer, has 

 slaughtered so much of the game that the lions 

 have died out for lack of nourishment, or have 

 retired farther and farther from the haunts of 

 men. In three months of hunting I had seen 

 tracks of but three lions, and there seemed little 

 chance of any success at my favourite sport of 

 lion hunting. Yet there was a family of lions 

 within 10 miles of Benguella, and this chapter 

 gives the story of the death of one of them at the 

 hands of a plucky Portuguese novice. 



Mr. William Machado, the man who shot the 

 lion, was acting as director of the railway in the 

 absence of his father, and on my journey to the 

 south of Angola he took me with him, along the 

 railway line from Lobito to my starting-point, 

 Catengue. But we did not reach Catengue that 

 day, for at Benguella, our first stop, we heard 

 such good news of lion at Bimbas, that we decided 

 to go there instead. 



We motored from Benguella to Bimbas, along 

 the open valley of the Cavaco River, and some- 

 o 



