x FOREWORD 
bably have added Col. Patterson to its long list 
of victims, for in my own experience I have known 
of three instances of men having been pulled from 
trees or huts built on platforms at a greater 
height from the ground than the crazy structure 
on which Col. Patterson was watching on that night 
of terrors. 
From the time of Herodotus until to-day, lion 
stories innumerable have been told and written. I 
have put some on record myself. But no lion story 
I have ever heard or read equals in its long- 
sustained and dramatic interest the story of the 
Tsavo man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A 
lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very 
terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few 
hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man- 
eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out 
over several months, and only at last brought to 
an end by the resource and determination of one 
man. 
It was some years after 1 read the first account 
published of the Tsavo man-eaters that I made the 
acquaintance of President Roosevelt. I told him 
all I remembered about it, and he was so deeply 
interested in the story—as he is in all true stories 
of the nature and characteristics of wild animals— 
that he begged me to send him the short printed 
account as published in Zhe Freld. This I did; 
