TO LAKE NAIVASHA 
199 
whole herd came jostling and crowding in behind them, the 
water gurgling down their thirsty throats; and immediately 
afterward off they went at a gallop, stopping to graze some 
hundreds of yards away. The ceaseless dread of the lion 
felt by all but the heaviest game is amply justified by his 
ravages among them. They are always in peril from him 
at the drinking places; yet in my experience I found that 
in the great majority of cases they were killed while feeding 
or resting far from water, the lion getting them far more 
often by stalking than by lying in wait. A lion will eat a 
zebra (beginning at the hind quarters, by the way, and some¬ 
times having, and sometimes not having, previously disem¬ 
bowelled the animal), or one of the bigger buck at least once 
a week—perhaps once every five days. The dozen lions we 
had killed would probably, if left alive, have accounted for 
seven or eight hundred buck, pig, and zebra within the next 
year. Our hunting was a net advantage to the harmless 
game. 
The zebras were the noisiest of the game. After them 
came the wildebeest, which often uttered their queer grurit; 
sometimes a herd would stand and grunt at me for some 
minutes as I passed, a few hundred yards distant. The 
topi uttered only a kind of sneeze, and the hartebeest a 
somewhat similar sound. The so-called Roberts’ gazelle 
was merely the Grant’s gazelle of the Athi, with the lyrate 
shape of the horns tending to be carried to an extreme 
of spread and backward bend. The tommy bucks carried 
good horns; the horns of the does were usually aborted, 
and were never more than four or five inches long. The 
most notable feature about the tommies was the incessant 
switching of their tails, as if jerked by electricity. In the 
