MAN-EATERS IN UGANDA 
East, yet every district has tales of such pests. The most 
striking is that of the two lions which for three weeks, as the 
culmination of a long period of terror, “held up” the Uganda 
railway, then (1898) building across the valley of the Athi 
River in British East Africa. Encamped at a point named 
Tsavo was a construction force of several hundred East Indian 
coolies and workmen, besides many negro helpers and camp 
followers, superintended by an English engineer and army 
officer, Colonel J. H. Patterson and some assistants — the 
former a man of heroic mold, as so many of his countrymen 
in similar positions have proved themselves to be ! 
The very first night of the encampment ‘one or two coolies disap- 
peared,” no one knew exactly how; but soon after a powerful Sikh fore- 
man was dragged from his tent in the midst of the camp by a Tsavo 
‘lion, taken into the bush andeaten. That night Colonel Patter- _—_ Lions. 
son sat up in a tree near the jemadar’s tent and listened to the screams 
which told that another man had been snatched from sleep and life in a 
more distant part of the scattered camp. To hunt the animals by day in the 
jungle was utterly futile. . | Colonel Patterson and the station doctor 
built a thorn fence around their tent, but had little confidence in it; and, as 
the former remarks in a detailed account of the affair in The Field (London, 
Feb. 17 and 24, 1900), “it was jumpy work to sit reading or writing 
there after dark, as we never knew but that a lion might spring over the 
boma and be on us.” 
In spite of concentrating the camps, keeping fires and watchers, every 
second or third night a man was taken, several times from the hospital. 
Continual efforts to see and shoot the man-eaters met with failure, and 
proved exceedingly dangerous. One night the Colonel and another man 
placed themselves inside a freight car standing on the track and waited, 
only to be surprised by a lion leaping at the door and falling back from the 
blaze of guns in his face after he had alighted on the floor of the car. Other 
sportsmen came to camp and sat up with guns at various likely places 
over night, laid traps and tracked the brutes by daylight, but got neither of 
them, for it was now well ascertained that there were two working in com- 
pany; and the murders continued. 
Then came an unaccountable quiet, and after six months of peace every 
one believed the danger passed, when suddenly the man-eaters reappeared, 
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