196 
TO LAKE NAIVASHA 
[CH. IX 
twice on false alarms wheeled and fled at speed. At 
last the leaders ventured to the brink of the pool, and 
at once the 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 drink¬ 
ing 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 sometimes having, and sometimes not having, 
previously disembowelled 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 prob¬ 
ably, 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 grunt. 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 
