84 THE LAND OF THE LION 



the sun. And when, as now, the grass is growing, and the 

 dew lies heavy after the night, they will choose some high 

 dry ant heap for a morning conclave, and a needed sun- 

 bath. All through this lower Nzoia country, the ant hills 

 some of them of great size, stand thickly, and the game has 

 a habit of mounting them and looking around. You see a 

 level unobstructed stretch of green grass for a hundred yards 

 or so before you. Then a group of ant hills, with thorny 

 bushes in clumps of ten or fifteen yards in diameter, standing 

 between them. Then an acre or two of higher ripening 

 grass, the whole forming an ideal stalking country, also a 

 sort of place where wounded game may require some reach- 

 ing for. It was through this sort of thing we had advanced 

 very silently for a quarter of a mile or more, when another 

 purring grunt sounded, not a bit nearer than the first, 

 but as we were all expectancy, and the mule was away 

 behind us, we heard it clearly this time and knew it was 

 made by a lion. Almost immediately afterward my 

 Brownie whispered "simba" pointing at a clump of bushes 

 two hundred yards away, and I knew that after long waiting 

 I was at least within shooting distance of a lion at last. To 

 many a man such a moment may have come as an ordinary 

 one, but not so to me. Day after day for five long months, 

 I had never gone out hunting in the early morning without 

 hoping and longing to find myself face to face with the finest 

 beast in the world ; the lion of British East Africa and 

 though I cannot say that hope deferred made the heart sick 

 in my case it certainly did make the hunter keen. 



One hundred and seventy yards in front of the bush we 

 crouched under, a bushy screen of thorn stretched for twenty 

 or thirty yards. Beyond that rose a wide low red ant hill, 

 and round the warm sunny bare base of it, there seemed to 

 be a buff coloured yellowish mass. The intervening thorns 

 hid the crown of the ant hill, and anything there might be 

 on it was invisible to me, but the fawn coloured mass at the 



