316 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
hunter, and a man of absolute reliability, and what he has told 
me concerning the lions he has met with in Eastern Africa is 
so different from my own experience that I can only conclude 
that, speaking generally, those animals differ, as I say, in 
character in different portions of the continent ; and if that is 
the case, my remarks will only apply to lions in Southern Africa. 
I ought first to say, however, that though my experience 
of lions is considerable, it is not as great as many people 
might suppose. I have never missed an opportunity of 
shooting them when it presented itself, but I have never 
systematically hunted these animals. Thus, although I have 
spent twenty years in the wilds of Africa, I have only shot 
twenty-five lions when entirely by myself, though besides these 
I have assisted at the shooting of eleven others, and helped to 
skin eight more in which there were no bullets of mine. The 
greatest number of lions I have shot in one season is only 
seven. Altogether this is a very poor record compared to the 
prodigious bags of lions made of late years in Somaliland by 
Colonel Arthur Paget, Lord Delamere, Colonel Curtis, Lord 
Wolverton and other English sportsmen ; though I think that 
there are portions of South-Eastern Africa where equally large 
bags might be made, if one devoted oneself systematically to lion 
hunting. Such as my experience has been, however, I will 
give it. : 
When lions are encountered in the daytime, they will almost 
invariably give way before the presence of man, even when 
several are together feeding upon the carcase of an animal 
they have just killed, and at a time when they are presumably 
hungry. In parts of the country where firearms have been 
much used, lions will sometimes retreat so rapidly when they 
are disturbed that it is next to an impossibility to get a shot at 
one. Iremember one cold cloudy winter’s morning in Mashona- 
land coming suddenly upon a male lion, as he was chasing a 
small herd of koodoo cows. When he observed me, he at once 
stopped and gazed fixedly at me for just ong instant of time, 
and then, wheeling round, went off through the forest at such a 
