ON THE STONY ATHI 
227 
this, on Stony Athi, we pitched camp. Here before 
each dawn we occupied posts commanding views far and 
wide over the veld, and eagerly “glassed” every beast 
that moved in hopes of recognising an approaching lion ; 
but none appeared. Later we tried “ driving ” the 
tinga-tinga—a job our men shied at till promised back¬ 
sheesh in event of success. We also pushed through 
the heavy flags ourselves ; but that was blind work, and 
in the result never so much as saw a lion. They might 
still be there, nevertheless, so dense and extensive was 
the covert. 
It was at this point that, a year or two earlier, our 
friend Mr. Chalmers Bontein was rather badly mauled 
by a lion he had wounded and followed into cover. 
One evening our men collecting fire-wood rushed in 
to report a lion close by. It proved to be a hyena, 
which animals wailed around the camp every night. 
Meanwhile a double misfortune had overtaken me. 
From the start it had been clear that my Somali hunter, 
Said Hassan (whom I had brought from Aden), was a 
fraud. He was, moreover, an arrogant self-opinionated 
ass, who created trouble in the safari. A really good 
Somali is an invaluable assistant in stalking, their 
trained eyesight holding in view every movement of 
the game even when in forest or bush. Such was my 
Elmi Hassan in 1904, and such my brother’s present 
hunter, Ali Yama, On the other hand, Said’s sum total 
of fieldcraft consisted in half-a-dozen monkey tricks. I 
therefore packed him back to Aden, having had to pay 
his passage over 4,000 miles on the faith of “ chits” 
(references) that he had never earned. During the rest 
of this trip I did my hunting alone, employing the 
Swahili, Mabruki, as gunbearer. 
My experience of Somali hunters is that three out of 
every four who profess to be shikaris are not worth their 
“ ghee.” 
The second trouble was worse—a sheer catastrophe. 
A brand-new, costly, telescope-sighted rifle, the weapon 
upon which all my reliance was centred, went to bits 
