114 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
was utterly unmoved by lion, leopard, or rhino, evidently 
held this snake in respect, and yelled to me to get out of 
the way. Accordingly, I jumped back a few feet, and the 
snake came over the ground where I had stood; its evil 
genius then made it halt for a moment and raise its head 
to a height of perhaps three feet, and I killed it by a shot 
through the neck. The porters were much wrought up 
about the snake, and did not at all like my touching it and 
taking it up, first by the tail and then by the head. It was 
only twelve feet long. We tied it to a long stick and sent 
it in by two porters. 
Another day we beat for lions, but without success. 
We rode to a spot a few miles off, where we were joined by 
three Boer farmers. They were big, upstanding men, 
looking just as Boer farmers ought to look who had been 
through a war and had ever since led the adventurous life 
of frontier farmers in wild regions. They were accom¬ 
panied by a pack of big, rough-looking dogs, but were on 
foot, walking with long and easy strides. The dogs looked 
a rough-and-ready lot, but on this particular morning 
showed themselves of little use; at any rate they put up 
nothing. 
But Kermit had a bit of deserved good luck. While 
the main body of us went down the river-bed, he and Mc¬ 
Millan, with a few natives, beat up a side ravine, down 
the middle of which ran the usual dry watercourse fringed 
with patches of brush. In one of these they put up a leop¬ 
ard, and saw it slinking forward ahead of them through 
the bushes. Then they lost sight of it, and came to the con¬ 
clusion that it was in a large thicket. So Kermit went on 
one side of it and McMillan on the other, and the beaters 
