224 ELEPHANT-HUNTING [ch. x 
and galloped after them, followed by Judd, seventy or 
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 what¬ 
ever ; 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 buffaloes (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 Govern¬ 
ment House, I met a Government official who had 
once succeeded in driving into a corral seventy zebras, 
including more stallions than mares. Their misfortune 
