ELEPHANT HUNTING 
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eighty yards behind. One lioness stopped and crouched 
under a bush, let Selous pass, and then charged Judd. 
She was right alongside him, and he fired from the hip; 
the bullet went into her eye; his horse jumped and swerved 
at the shot, throwing him off, and he found himself sitting 
on the ground, not three yards from the dead lioness. 
Nothing more was seen of the other. 
Continually I met men with experiences in their past 
lives which showed how close the country was to those 
primitive conditions in which warfare with wild beasts was 
one of the main features of man’s existence. At one dinner 
my host and two of my fellow-guests had been within a 
year or eighteen months severely mauled by lions. All 
three, by the way, informed me that the actual biting caused 
them at the moment no pain whatever; the pain came later. 
On meeting Harold Hill, my companion on one of my 
Kapiti Plains lion hunts, I found that since I had seen him 
he had been roughly handled by a dying leopard. The 
government had just been obliged to close one of the trade 
routes to native caravans because of the ravages of a man- 
eating lion, which carried men away from the camps. A 
safari which had come in from the north had been charged 
by a rhino, and one of the porters tossed and killed, the 
horn being driven clean through his loins. At Heatley’s 
farm three buffalo (belonging to the same herd from which 
we had shot five) rushed out of the papyrus one afternoon 
at a passing buggy, which just managed to escape by a 
breakneck run across the level plain, the beasts chasing it 
for a mile. One afternoon, at Government House, I met 
a government official who had once succeeded in driving 
into a corral seventy zebras, including more stallions than 
