724 MR. A. LOVERIDOE ; NOTES ON 



it, sprang over it find made off. The boy was quite dead. I could 

 see very few marks on the body except where tihe liad ^carried hiui 

 in her jaws. 



She then crossed tlie piece of waste laud and caine out on a 

 path where she clawed up the ground considerably, presunmbly 

 to clean her claws, or in a fit of annoyance. She followed the 

 path for hal£-a-mile, then cut across another fifty yards of rank 

 weeds, and came to the edge of a little clearing where a woman 

 was sitting under the eaves of her hut shelling maize into a dish ; 

 her baby was slung- on her back. Again the lioness lay down, 

 to take her bearings I suppose, then sprang upon the woman, 

 whom she carried off to beneath a tree fifty yards away. The 

 woman sci-eamed, and beat the lioness about the face with her 

 bare hands ; neighbours seized firebrands, tins, etc. with which 

 XiO make a noise, and sallied forth. They caught sight of the 

 lioness crouching over the woman beneath the tree, where it had, 

 without doubt, taken lier to eat ; at the sight of the rescue party 

 the lioness bolted. This was alwut 7.30 p.m. The baby was 

 unhurt, t'ne mother horribly mauled. 



The animal next made for Kilosa, and on reaching the village 

 of Mkwatani broke into a hut where two women lived together. 

 It smashed down the door, which was oixly made of matama stalk.s,j 

 dragged the body ten feet from the door and ate half of it. 

 There w^ere six othei' huts within a hundred yards, and when the 

 neighbours rose next morning they caught sight of the lioness 

 crouching over her prey, she also saw them and cleared. A 

 messenger brought me the news soon after daybreak, and I sent 

 him back with instructions on no account to move the body. I 

 set oft* on my cycle, and when close to Mkwatani another native 

 met me with the information that the lioness had returned in 

 bright sunshine at 8 a.m. and carried the body off into the 

 matama. I followed the trail (which was well marked with 

 various items such as a bit of gory rag, some toes, bits of fat and 

 the like) for a hundred yards, wlien the matama became so thick 

 one could not see ten feet away, and had perforce to make con- 

 siderable noise in forcing our way through it, so we returned — the 

 boys to make ti-aps, while I went on to investigate the other 

 "kills" already referred to. At 5 p.m. an askari on his own 

 initiative wormed his way up to the lioness as she was feeding 

 vinder a mango tree, and riddled her with bullets from a few feet 

 away. 



A Ilippoboscid (II. capen&is. v. Olf.) was taken on one specimen. 



With Lions at their Kill. 



One morning, in October '21,1 was sitting some fifty yards from 

 a water-hole, when I noticed a little group of animals wending 

 their way through the thorn-bush towards the water, from which 

 they were still a hundred and fifty yards. At the first glance 

 I thought that they were a little group of buck, but a second later 



