CREATURES OF THE WILDERNESS 107 



Not every tiger, or lion, that eats a man is a 

 man-eater by habit. The true man-eater stalks 

 and kills its victims without provocation. If a 

 wounded tiger should charge and kill a man 

 and then devour him, the animal was not 

 necessarily a man-eater before, though such an 

 experience might make one of it henceforth. 

 It is somewhat remarkable that the natives of 

 Africa also regard man-eating lions as old and 

 worn out, and Livingstone quotes them as 

 saying of an old lion, "His teeth are worn ; he 

 will soon kill men." As a matter of fact, lions 

 take to man-eating less often than tigers, and 

 leopards more rarely still. The man-eating 

 lions, with which, as told in that extraordinary 

 book of his, The Man-eaters of Tsavo, Colonel 

 Patterson had so much trouble while engaged 

 on railway construction in Africa, took dreadful 

 toll of his coolies, but the leopards destroyed 

 only his sheep and goats, one of them killing a 

 whole flock in a single night. If the leopard, 

 with its facility for climbing trees and lying 

 in wait over the jungle-paths, should take 

 regularly to man-eating, it would indeed be 

 a terrible scourge. It may be that this power 

 of climbing saves man from its appetite, for it 

 is able to catch abundance of monkeys, which, 

 though much appreciated, usually escape the 

 jaws of the tiger. Now and then, it is true, 

 tigers do stalk monkeys, and in some parts of 



