40 PEACE: LION HUNTING 



pleasant and attractive face, was a fine specimen 

 of humanity ; a beautifully made man, with the 

 litheness of the racehorse or the tiger. Even his 

 manner and speech seemed well bred and soft ; 

 the kind of man to make a champion swimmer or 

 boxer, or a second Tom Richardson, yet with 

 hands and arms that an actress might envy. All 

 four walked lightly, and with graceful movements, 

 like highly trained thoroughbreds, and my only 

 regret is that I was unable to have any real talk 

 with them. 



All these bushmen tribes are in the truest sense 

 savages, as are our Australian aboriginals. Honey 

 getters, root eaters, and snarers of small game, 

 nothing comes amiss to them, even the remains 

 of a lion's kill, but they toil not, neither do they 

 spin. It must take both skill and pluck to live 

 and to hold their own as these bushmen do, and 

 at times it must often be a hard struggle for them. 

 Where lions are thick and bold, they are dangers 

 just as real to-day to these bushmen as the sabre- 

 toothed tiger was to our cavemen ancestors. 



Beautiful trackers are these bushmen, the sand 

 with all its footprints being their newspaper, which 

 they read as they travel along. Nothing escapes 

 their notice ; everything is an open book to them. 

 Let them cross the big bullock-like tracks of a 

 giraffe (" Garvie," as they call him), and at once 

 they know all about the big beast : how long ago 

 he passed, and whether he was feeding, or was 

 going fast, or was perplexed and anxious. They 



