NOTES ON SOMALILAND, 285 
for a tracker, silent coolness and self-reliance. They went about their work 
in a perfectly quiet and confident way, whether on the trail or in the pre- 
sence of game, It was the greatest pleasure to me to follow a trail with this 
boy—the spoor and the jungle were to him an open book, “who runs may 
read,” and the ease and accuracy with which he did it were an education. 
When I came to anything I didnot understand, I would give him a nudge, 
and he would stop and explain the situation to me ina whisper. On one 
occasion I remember, when we were following the trail of a lion throughout 
his previous night’s wanderings in search of a meal, we came to a point where 
the tracks of a leopard and a Gerenuk (Gazella walleri) became mingled with 
his ; a little further on there was some dry blood, and the signs of a struggle, 
I should have taken a month of Sundays to make out the puzzle, but 
Mahomed had very soon deciphered it, and taking me back a little way 
along the track he demonstrated to me how the leopard had overtaken and 
killed the Gerenuk early in the night, and how the lion, having hit off their 
track quite recently, had surprised the leopard at his meal and fought with 
him for it. He seemed to be right, for the leopard had taken his departure 
at this juncture and had gone empty away,and there was no longer any 
trace of the Gerenuk being dragged as before. Making a cast round this 
spot we soon picked up the tracks of the lion going in the opposite direction, 
and we had scarcely gone another half-mile when we put him up out of a 
clump of grass, where he was devouring the scanty remains of the Gerenuk. 
This was evidently not his “kill’’ but the leopard’s, as Mahomed had 
rightly surmised, for the state of it showed that it had been killed early in 
the night, and a good deal of it eaten then, 
The boy never boasted of his accurate expositions on such occasions ; he 
would simply give a quiet smile of satisfaction when the sequel proved his 
deductions to have been right, 
The pair of lions which I mentioned when discussing the Rhino, furnish 
a good instance of the precarious existence which these game-hunting gentle- 
men often lead. At the time we met with them we were encamped on the 
southern edge of the Haud, whither we had gone especially to hunt Rhino, 
It was the driest and hottest season of the year—March—when all the water 
pools are exhausted, and remain so till the coming rains refill them. 
There were consequently no human beings about, and antelopes at the 
time were very scarce, so much so that we had the greatest difficulty in 
getting anything in the shape of meat to eat; yet there were lion tracks 
about in abundance and more or less recent. We haa been encamped in 
the same spot for three days, and two nights out of three had heard the 
roaring of a lion quite close to camp, as it seemed to us. Hach morning I had 
gone out expecting to find a kill, or at any rate to pick up the tracks of a lion 
at no great distance, but without success; our “ties” were never touched, 
and the animal that we had heard calling seemed to be a spirit, for each day, 
