APPENDIX. 269 



I remember once putting up a lion and lioness in a reedy river-bed. They broke away on 

 the opposite side, and made up a bare stony rise, so that I could see them perfectly well. One 

 was very full of meat, and almost dragging its stomach along the ground. Half-way up the 

 rise was a Thomson's gazelle, which had seen me and was staring in my direction over the heads 

 of the lions. 



I was watching the Thomson's to see when it would notice the lions and how soon it would 

 move out of their way, as they were making directly for it. They drew nearer and nearer, and still 

 the gazelle stared at me and took no notice of them. At last the lions were only a few yards 

 from it, and still it never took its eyes off me, but skipped a few yards to a flank and still stared. 

 The lions must have passed over the actual spot on which it had been standing, yet it never 

 turned to look at them, either as they passed or after they had passed behind it. 



I could quote many instances of lions having passed close to game, though not quite so near 

 as in this particular instance, and of the game having remained absolutely indifferent to them. 



I have never heard of a case of a man-eating lion on the plains, and the few accounts one 

 hears of lions attempting to take stock near the plains, I fancy, are generally, in point of fact, bush- 

 lions which have travelled up from their usual habitats. As all the upland natives are quite 

 immune from attacks by lions, they do not hold the animal in the same superstitious dread as do 

 such peoples as the natives of Nyasaland and North-eastern Rhodesia. It is to this that I attribute 

 the fact that the natives of the former countries are always ready to bring in khabar of lions, if 

 encouraged to do so, whereas the natives of the latter countries, in which places numbers of them 

 are annually devoured by man-eaters, cannot be induced to betray the animals' whereabouts. 



The plain-dwelling lions, as already remarked, prefer zebra to any other animals, this animal 

 always being extraordinarily fat and in good condition. Failing zebra they will kill a hartebeest 

 or waterbuck, and are also fond of an occasional warthog. If there are buffalo in the bush near 

 their particular plain they may sometimes hunt them, but this is rather outside their province. 

 They will eat impala, but do not go out of their way to kill the animal. 



The amount they eat varies. I once killed two impala as bait for lions. They started on 

 the first soon after sunset, and I found them just finishing the second before sunrise, the party 

 consisting of four, two lions and two lionesses. They had killed and finished a zebra the day 

 before, so they could not have been very empty. 



One of the two impala I killed within 400 yards of camp just about sunset. Close by the 

 spot there was a great mass of rocks, covered with vegetation, and I saw a lion poking his head 

 out from the top of this watching me, but he withdrew quickly directly he saw that I was looking 

 at him. So soon as night fell, he came down and went straight to the impala, uttering loud roars, 

 no doubt to call his friends. Of this animal they only left the horns and the hoofs. The other 

 impala I killed in a little grassy dip between two walls of rock, twenty or thirty feet high. My 

 intention was to climb up on one of these walls, the one nearest camp, and crawl along the top 

 until I arrived at a place overlooking the kill, and about forty yards from it, from which it would 

 have been easy to take a quiet shot at anything feeding on the kill. Moreover, from this com- 

 manding position I should have been able to get in a second and a third effective shot at close 

 range, for to escape the lion would have had to bolt up or down the little grassy glade between 

 the walls of rock. 



However, they were not quite so simple as I gave them credit for being, for as I reached the 

 rocky wall in the morning, and was about to pass on to the place at which I intended to climb 

 up, I heard a low rasping purr from the top. Climbing cautiously up, I heard a scrunching 



