v LIONS KILLED BY POISONED ARROWS 95 



a heavy meal, and then to shoot one of their little 

 reed arrows into some part of its body from behind 

 the shelter of a bush or tree. The sharp prick 

 would awake the lion but not greatly alarm it, and 

 as it would see nothing to account for the disturb- 

 ance of its slumbers, it would probably think it had 

 been stung by some fly. 1 t would probably, however, 

 get up and walk away. The shaft of the arrow 

 would soon fall to the ground, but the bone head, 

 barbed and thickly smeared with poison, would 

 remain fixed in its victim's hide, and the deadly 

 compound would gradually permeate its blood and 

 sap its strength. The Bushmen averred that a 

 lion once struck by a poisoned arrow never re- 

 covered, though it would not die till the third day. 



Domestic animals such as horses and oxen some- 

 times show great alarm at the near proximity of lions, 

 at others they only seem slightly scared, and some- 

 times they do not seem to be frightened at all. If 

 a horse has once been bitten by a lion, or if another 

 horse tied up close to it has been attacked, it will 

 probably ever afterwards evince <^reat fear at the 

 smell of a lion. But, on the other hand, I have had 

 several horses in my possession, which I bought in 

 the Cape Colony or the Orange Free State, which, 

 when I had trained them to carry the meat of 

 antelopes, never showed the slightest sign of fear 

 when a reeking lion skin was put on their backs, 

 although they could never possibly have seen or 

 smelt a lion before I took them up country. I had 

 some trouble at first to train some of these horses 

 to carry the meat of any kind of fresh-killed game, 

 and they always began by smelling it and then 

 snorting ; but once they became accustomed to the 

 smell of antelope meat, they showed no further 

 alarm when the skin of a freshly killed lion was 

 thrown over the saddle. 



I have known a herd of cattle, after one of their 



