152 
THROUGH SOMALILAND AND ABYSSINIA chap. 
hunter Geli, five yards from the goat, to watch for the panther 
by the light of the rising moon. After an hour, just as we had 
begun to get tired of watching, and were nodding off to sleep, 
the panther charged and carried the goat away. The loop-hole 
we had prepared in our brushwood screen had been too small, 
allowing no room laterally for a moving shot. 
The panther carried away the kid at a gallop, and we rushed 
after him in the moonlight over the rocky ground and scrub, and 
made him drop it when he had gone some two hundred yards 
from camp ; we then dragged the carcase back and secured it in 
the same place, tying its leg with a stout rope to a stake 
hammered into the ground, the rope being smeared with muddy 
water to make it less conspicuously white. We also fastened a 
live goat by the side of the dead one. 
After another wait of half an hour Hassan the Midgan, who 
sat on my left, touched me gently and pointed. Looking up I 
saw a panther’s head five yards from the goat, gray and ghost- 
like, and next second in a flash he had sprung on the live goat’s 
neck, but finding it fastened to the stake he let go and bounded 
on, giving no time for a shot. I searched all next day in the 
thick ergin jungle round camp, but failed to put him up, although 
we found a cave which had evidently been his lair. 
On the next night I again went for a walk along the river- 
bed alone, and saw the mate of the hyaena I had killed the 
night before | but I held my fire for fear of driving away any 
leopards from the neighbourhood. 
I sat up again, and at eight o’clock, while it was still nearly 
dark, a large leopard charged the goat at full gallop, and I fired 
without looking along the sights, the light being too dim to see 
the platinum bead. I fired a snap-shot with my eyes thrown 
upon the bait as the gray silhouette of the leopard pounced on 
to it, and pulled the trigger at random as it for a moment 
obscured the white form of the goat ; the leopard left the goat 
struggling and bounded away across the river. The smoke 
hung heavily, and even when it had cleared away I could only 
make out the white outline of the goat in front, lying in its 
death-throes ; beyond that the black silhouette of the bush- 
covered hill, and the white light in the sky which would soon 
be replaced by the disc of the rising moon. I distinctly heard 
the leopard spring up the hill on the other side of the river ; 
and then she stopped, growling at intervals, and evidently 
badly wounded, for I could hear the cracking branches of the 
