ch. xii] LORD DELAMERE’S RANCH 355 
home ranch was most attractive—especially the library, 
the room containing Lady Delamere’s books. Delamere 
had been himself a noted big-game hunter, his bag 
including fifty-two lions ; but instead of continuing to 
be a mere sportsman, he turned his attention to stock- 
raising and wheat-growing, and became a leader in the 
work of taming the wilderness, of conquering for 
civilization the world’s waste spaces. No career can be 
better worth following. 
During his hunting years Delamere had met with 
many strange adventures. One of the lions he shot 
mauled him, breaking his leg, and also mauling his two 
Somali gun-bearers. The lion then crawled off into 
some bushes fifty yards away, and camp was pitched 
where the wounded men were lying. Soon after night¬ 
fall the hyenas assembled in numbers, and attacked, 
killed, and ate the mortally wounded lion, the noise 
made by the combatants being ear-rending. On another 
occasion he had heard a leopard attack some baboons in 
the rocks, a tremendous row following as the big dog 
baboons hastened to the assistance of the one who had 
been seized, and drove off the leopard. That evening 
a leopard, evidently the same one, very thin and hungry, 
came into camp and was shot; it was frightfully bitten, 
the injuries being such as only baboons inflict, and 
would unquestionably have died of its wounds. The 
leopard, wherever possible, takes his kill up a tree, 
showing extraordinary strength in the performance of 
this feat. It is undoubtedly due to fear of interference 
from hyenas. The ’Ndorobo said that no single hyena 
would meddle with a leopard, but that three or four 
would without hesitation rob it of its prey. Some 
years before this time, while hunting north of Kenia, 
Lord Delamere had met a Dr. Kolb, who was killed by 
