66 THE LAND OF THE LION 



country do not compare with those obtainable near the 

 German border, what a game list I have made out for 

 this beautiful part of East Africa! I should have said that 

 very large reed buck and bush buck are constantly to be met. 

 One more animal I must name, for he is well worth taking 

 trouble to secure the African wild dog. 



There are lions from Mombassa to the Lake. They turn 

 up often in most unexpected ways and places, and you may 

 hunt for months in good lion country and see none. A 

 greenhorn strolls out of his tent on the Athi, at an absurdly 

 late hour for a sportsman to go forth, and walks on top of 

 a lion, sunning himself, on an ant heap. The lion is looking 

 the other way, and the lucky greenhorn gets his first lion so 

 -easily, that he tells you "there is nothing in lion hunting." 



I knew an engineer who has run up and down the Uganda 

 railroad on his inspecting Spider, thousands of miles in the 

 year. He has been doing it for many years. His train 

 hands, on construction trains, often see lions and shoot them. 

 A German professor looks out of his carriage window, 

 .sees a lion feeding on a zebra. The train is courteously 

 stopped, he bags that lion. Hundreds of lions have been 

 seen from the railroad, but, my friend has, in all these years, 

 never seen one. 



A young friend of mine found himself in Mombassa with 

 a few idle days on his hands. He knew little about hunt- 

 ing and nothing about the country, so he scraped together 

 somehow the odds and ends of a small sefari, and hied him 

 into the rough scrubby bush that surrounds that town. He 

 not only saw a lioness, a thing most unusual thereabouts 

 no old-timer could have found even a lion's spoor in the 

 place but he wounded her, and crawled after her into 

 the worst sort of thorn scrub cover. She waited patiently 

 for him there and charged and mauled him ? not 

 a bit of it! But most amiably let him finish her off. 



Emboldened by his luck, he did the same thing with 



