African Game Trails 
405 
burly and too savage to run hard, and we 
were anxious that our hands should be 
reasonably steady when we shot; all told, 
the horses, galloping and cantering, did not 
take us two miles. 
The lion stopped and lay down behind a 
bush; jumping off I took a shot at him at 
two hundred yards, but only wounded him 
slightly in one paw; and after a moment’s 
Sullen hesitation off he went, lashing his tail. 
We mounted our horses and wentafter him; 
Tarlton lost sight of him, but I marked him 
lying down behind a low grassy ant hill. 
Again we dismounted at a distance of two 
hundred yards; Tarlton telling me that now 
he was sure to charge. In all East Africa 
there is no man, not even Cuninghame him¬ 
self, whom I would rather have by me than 
Tarlton,' if in difficulties with a charging 
lion; on this occasion, however, I am glad 
to say that his rifle was badly sighted, and 
shot altogether too low. 
Again I knelt and fired; but the mass of 
hair on the lion made me think he was near¬ 
er than he was, and I undershot, inflicting a 
flesh wound that was- neither crippling nor 
fatal. He was already grunting savagely 
and tossing his tail erect, with' his head held 
low; and at the shot the great sinewy beast 
came toward us with the speed of a grey¬ 
hound. Tarlton then, very properly, fired, 
for lion hunting is no child’s play, and it 
is not good to run risks. ' Ordinarily it is - 
a very mean thing to experience joy at a 
friend’s miss; but this was not an ordinary 
case, and I felt keen delight when the bullet 
from the badly sighted rifle missed, striking 
the ground many yards short. I was sight¬ 
ing carefully, from my knee, and I knew I 
had the lion all right; for though he gal¬ 
loped at a great pace, he came on steadily 
—ears laid back, and uttering terrific cough¬ 
ing grunts—and there was now no question 
of making allowance for distance, nor, as 
he was out in the open, for the fact that he 
had not before been distinctly visible. The 
bead of my foresight was exactly on the cen¬ 
tre of his chest as -1 pressed the trigger, 
and the bullet went as true as if the place 
had been plotted with dividers. The blow 
brought him up all standing, and he fell 
forward on his head. The soft-nosed Win¬ 
chester bullet had gone straight through the 
chest cavity, smashing the lungs and the big 
blood-vessels of the heart. Painfully he re¬ 
covered his feet, and tried to come on, his 
Vol. XLVII.—43 
ferocious courage holding out to the last; 
but he staggered, and turned from side to 
side, unable to stand firmly, still less to ad¬ 
vance at a faster pace than a walk. He had 
not ten seconds to live; but it is a sound 
principle to take no chances with lions. 
Tarlton hit him with his second bullet, prob¬ 
ably in the shoulder; and with my next 
shot I broke his neck. I had stopped him 
when he was still a hundred yards away; 
and certainly no finer sight could be imag¬ 
ined than that of this great maned lion as 
he charged. Kermit gleefully joined us as 
we walked up to the body; only one of our 
followers had been able to keep up with him 
on his two-miles run. He had had a fine 
view of the charge, from one side, as he ran 
up, still three hundred yards distant; he 
could see all the muscles play as the lion 
galloped in, and then everything relax as he 
fell to the shock.of my bullet. 
The lion was a big old male, still in his 
prime. Between uprights his length was 
nine feet four inches, and his weight four 
hundred and ten pounds, for he was not 
fat. We skinned him and started for camp, 
which we reached after dark. There was 
a thunder-storm in the south-west, and in 
the red sunset that burned behind us the 
rain clouds turned to many gorgeous hues. 
Then daylight failed, the clouds cleared, 
and, as we made our way across the form¬ 
less plain, the half moon hung high over¬ 
head, strange stars shone in the brilliant 
heavens, and the Southern Cross lay radi¬ 
ant above the sky line. 
Our next camp was pitched on a stony 
plain, by a winding stream bed still con¬ 
taining an occasional- rush-fringed pool of 
muddy water, fouled by the herds and 
flocks of the numerous Masai. Game was 
plentiful around this camp. We killed 
what we needed of the common kinds, and 
in addition each of us killed a big rhino. 
The two rhinos were almost exactly alike, 
and their horns were of the so-called “ Keit- 
loa” type; the fore horn twenty-two inches 
long, the rear over seventeen. The day I 
killed mine I used all three of my rifles. We 
all went out together, as Kermit was desir¬ 
ous of taking photos of my rhino, if I shot 
one; he had not been able to get good ones 
of his on the previous day. We also took 
the small ox-wagon, so as to bring into camp 
bodily the rhino—if we got it—and one or 
two zebras, of which we wanted the flesh for 
