246 THE WILDERNESS AND JUNGLE 



less disastrous results. Even antelopes at bay 

 are capable of inflicting" fatal wounds with 

 their horns. 



The death-roll is a long one, yet the escapes 

 have been more numerous than the disasters 

 and certainly more wonderful. One or two of 

 these have already been told in these pages, 

 and it would be easy to compile an imposing 

 list of men, who seem to have been born under 

 a lucky star, being snatched from the jaws of 

 death at the eleventh hour. Moffatt, the 

 missionary, was first nearly killed by a lion 

 and then trod on a cobra. Andersson, a 

 mighty South African hunter in his day, was 

 severely injured and all but killed by a black 

 rhinoceros. Another equally famous old-time 

 sportsman, William Cotton Oswell, had the 

 rare and unenviable distinction of being tossed 

 first by a black and then by a white rhino- 

 ceros. Mr. F. C. Selous, who, as I write these 

 lines, is still hunting in the wilds of Africa, 

 was, at a time when even I was a schoolboy, 

 nearly crushed by an elephant, which knocked 

 him off his horse and knelt over him, vainly 

 trying to drive its tusks through his body ; and 

 he had another equally narrow escape from a 

 Cape buffalo. Livingstone, seized by a lion, 

 did not lose consciousness but waited for the 

 end, and so numbed were his faculties by the 

 horror of the situation that what he chiefly 



