238 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



preached one without feeling panic dread of their great 

 enemy the lion, who, they knew well, might be lurking 

 around their drinking-place. At such a pool I once saw 

 a herd of zebras come to water at nightfall. They stood 

 motionless some distance off; then they slowly approached, 

 and twice on false alarms wheeled and fled at speed; at last 

 the leaders ventured to the brink of the pool and at once the 

 whole herd came jostling and crowding in behind them, the 

 water gurgling down their thirsty throats; and immediately 

 afterward off they went at a gallop, stopping to graze some 

 hundreds of yards away. The ceaseless dread of the lion 

 felt by all but the heaviest game is amply justified by his 

 ravages among them. They are always in peril from him 

 at the drinking-places; yet in my experience I found that 

 in the great majority of cases they were killed while feeding 

 or resting far from water, the lion getting them far more 

 often by stalking than by lying in wait. A lion will eat a 

 zebra (beginning at the hind quarters, by the way, and some- 

 times having, and sometimes not having, previously disem- 

 bowelled the animal) or one of the bigger buck at least once 

 a week perhaps once every five days. The dozen lions we 

 had killed would probably, if left alive, have accounted for 

 seven or eight hundred buck, pig, and zebra within the next 

 year. Our hunting was a net advantage to the harmless 

 game. 



The zebras were the noisiest of the game. After them 

 came the wildebeest, which often uttered their queer grunt; 

 sometimes a herd would stand and grunt at me for some 

 minutes as I passed, a few hundred yards distant. The 

 topi uttered only a kind of sneeze, and the hartebeest a 

 somewhat similar sound. The so-called Roberts' gazelle 

 was merely the Grant's gazelle of the Athi, with the lyrate 

 shape of the horns tending to be carried to an extreme 

 of spread and backward bend. The tommy bucks carried 

 good horns; the horns of the does were usually aborted, 

 and were never more than four or five inches long. The 

 most notable feature about the tommies was the incessant 



