NEGROES AND LIONS 
times at these afternoon drums as many as two hundred lions assembled. 
Each lion was known to the people by name, and to these they responded 
when called. And when one died the inhabitants of the village mourned 
for him as for one of themselves.” 
Many apparently honest natives vouched for the truth of 
this as eyewitnesses, but Cameron tells us to judge of it for 
ourselves. At any rate, such a sentiment is not widespread. 
As a rule the negroes fear lions little in the daytime, but where 
they are numerous guard their encampments carefully at night 
against them and the equally dreaded leopards. While some 
tribes will suffer long-continued raids upon their cattle, or even 
repeated losses of women and children, others instantly proceed 
against the marauder, for they know when one of these great 
cats has learned that it is easy to seize a man or a bullock it 
will continue to do so, and that it is quite as likely to be young 
and vigorous as aged and decrepit. The Buffonian fallacy 
that the nobility of the lion forbids him to attack anything but 
wild big game, “‘ worthy of his steel,’ was long ago discredited 
by awful experience. 
Even before the days of guns, a party of bold hunters would 
track him to his lair, and kill him with arrows and assegais, or 
would catch him in a pitfall and smother him to gavage 
death with smoke. Andersson describes how non- Mom Hunts. 
chalantly half a dozen Damaras near Walfisch Bay hastened 
into the brush at midnight to drive a lion from a zebra he 
had been heard to strike down, and stayed to cut it up and 
carry it away, although the angry beast was marching up and 
down so near that they hurled firebrands at him now and then 
to warn him off. Andersson adds that he knew of bands which 
subsisted largely by watching beside water-holes where lions 
came nightly to feed, and then driving the lions away from 
their well-earned quarry. 
In some tribes, as the Zulus, an army would be ordered out 
by a chief to surround a man-eater as soon as he became trouble- 
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