272 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



Williams, on the other hand, came across three. Two he 

 killed easily. The third charged him. He was carrying 

 a double-barrelled .450, but failed to stop the beast; it 

 seized him by the leg, and his life was saved by his Swahili 

 gun-bearer, who gave the lion a fatal shot as it stood over 

 him. He came within an ace of dying; but when I saw 

 him, at the hospital, he was well on the road to recovery. 

 One day Selous while on horseback saw a couple of lion- 

 esses, and galloped after them, followed by, Judd, seventy or 

 eighty yards behind. One lioness stopped and crouched 

 under a bush, let Selous pass, and then charged Judd. 

 She was right alongside him, and he fired from the hip; 

 the bullet went into her eye; his horse jumped and swerved 

 at the shot, throwing him off, and he found himself sitting 

 on the ground, not three yards from the dead lioness. 

 Nothing more was seen of the other. 



Continually I met men with experiences in their past 

 lives which showed how close the country was to those 

 primitive conditions in which warfare with wild beasts was 

 one of the main features of man's existence. At one dinner 

 my host and two of my fellow-guests had been within a 

 year or eighteen months severely mauled by lions. All 

 three, by the way, informed me that the actual biting caused 

 them at the moment no pain whatever; the pain came later. 

 On meeting Harold Hill, my companion on one of my 

 Kapiti Plains lion hunts, I found that since I had seen him 

 he had been roughly handled by a dying leopard. The 

 government had just been obliged to close one of the trade 

 routes to native caravans because of the ravages of a man- 

 eating lion, which carried men away from the camps. A 

 safari which had come in from the north had been charged 

 by a rhino, and one of the porters tossed and killed, the 

 horn being driven clean through his loins. At Heatley's 

 farm three buffalo (belonging to the same herd from which 

 we had shot five) rushed out of the papyrus one afternoon 

 at a passing buggy, which just managed to escape by a 

 breakneck run across the level plain, the beasts chasing it 



