A Breath from the Veldt 



291 



cover was burnt down, but nothing of interest turned up till near sunset, 

 when, on raising myself from the ground, where I had been lying smoking, 

 with one eye on the cover below me, the movement of something in a patch of 

 reeds in the middle of the sand attracted my attention. Nothing followed, 

 however ; so after waiting a while I began to think I was mistaken, and was 

 about to leave my post when a leopard quietly walked out on to the sand, and 

 stood looking over his shoulder at the smoke and fire moving towards him. 

 He was not more than sixty yards off when I fired, and I ought to have struck 

 him in a better place than the stomach, where my bullet caught him. These 

 cats, however, are soft, and a bullet gives them a far greater shock than it would 



A DYING LEOPARD 



a small antelope ; so Mr. Spotty lay down and squirmed, giving me time to 

 jam in another cartridge. Oom Roelef, who was behind some bushes when I 

 fired, now ran up, and firing at the same moment with myself as the leopard 

 began crawling away over the sand, one of the bullets at any rate went true, 

 passing through the top of the skull and out at the ear, and carrying instanta- 

 neous death ; whose bullet it was did not matter, and if it did neither of us 

 could possibly tell. It was not a particularly fine specimen of the leopard ; but 

 his skin was nicely spotted, and I noticed with interest how completely the 

 colouring of his coat blended with the surrounding objects as the sun shone 

 upon him. To the casual observer at home no skins are so brilliant as those of 

 the zebra and leopard, yet in no instance has Nature been so happy in her 



