Part 11 (2/2)

The encaht both cattle and horses with them One day all the hunters were away on horseback The oxen, in charge of a native herd, were grazing hi the ions In the middle of the forenoon a troop of lions came up openly and deliberately, and attacked the cattle, killing several One or tere pulled down on the very edge of the camp This was an almost unprecedented occurrence

One very iift to me of a pair of boots by Mr Hilton Barber I had, for weeks previously, been using sandals of buffalo hide, and et terribly scarred by thorns I shall never forget the comfort of that pair of boots

Our camp, some ten miles to the ard of shi+p Mountain, was ala, with sheer sides about ten feet deep At the bottom was a water-hole the only one within a radius of hts the lions would often coa to drink It was eerie, indeed, to lie in the flireat brutes within less than ten yards of where we lay I often tried to e of the donga, and try a shot By daylight the idea seeot so far as to translate this idea into action There is, I think, nothing so calculated to inificance as the knowledge, on a dark night, that lions are in one's i the brazen toned roar, which is but seldom heard, out of the question, the lion's ordinary voice see of incalculable immensity It reseether by querulous gruntle It is difficult to realize that the sound originates froe than a mammoth

Three times only have I heard a lion roar wrathfully The sound is harsh and shattering, and is pitched in a higher key than that of the growl Tothan the roar; it carried a suggestion of stealth coinable force in reserve The adjective ”thunderous” does not fit the roar at all; the latter suggests, hty, cavernous brass tru, however, is the suspicion that a lion is silently padding round your ca with himself as to whether he will or will not attack

Yes, it hen the phanto died” that I always dreaded the lion Indeed, in the early part of the night, when the awesome voices were audible often in several directions at once, there was little or no danger But just before dawn the silence suggested sinister possibilities An exaround after day had broken would occasionally show that a lion had circled round the cae to the attacking pitch But experience shows that the lion sometimes does attack, and when this happens it is alins to pale

The reason for this is easily discovered if one looks at the thing fro out the cases in which a lion is a confirmed man-eater, is wounded, or is cornered this animal never attacks man unless (1) when it is too old or stiff to catch and pull down gaaiven area and sta which not infrequently happens

Here, then, we have a desperately hungry brute; he one several days without food He winds a cas, creatures he knows to be edible but which, I fir asa ht, has perhaps prowled for a succession of hungry nights, and he knows that day is at hand Moreover, he knows that at dawn the last chance of his having a ly a conflict is set up in his mind His dislike of human flesh plus that dread of the human species which he shares with the whole brute creation is on the one side, his ravening hunger on the other Increase the hunger-pressure to a certain pitch, and the lion will attack I have not forgotten that ”The Man-Eaters of Tsavo” used to take their hu, but not alone had they deliberately adoptedimpunity hadin a patrol tent near Pretorius Kop on the Delagoa road The night was chill, so he folded a gunny bag over his feet to keep the seized him by the foot and pulled him out of the tent He knew at once what had happened, a lion had caught hold of him Close to where he lay stood a billy half full of cold tea He grasped this in passing, and, as soon as he was clear of the tent, belabored the lion over the face with it The brute dropped hihtly bruised, but the skin was not broken This proved clearly that the lion was an old one with teeth worn down to mere stumps

The first time I heard a lion roar hen two of them had pulled down a sick ox about a hundred yards from my tent Another lion approached, and the two in possession roared apparently to warn off the intruder

It was from the spoors, which I examined after day had broken, that I inferred the details To judge by the tracks the last-comer was a very old animal

The next occasion hen a donkey, which was tied to a tree within four paces of where I was sitting over a very s on the poor anied their prey into the bush, a distance of about twenty yards Then they roared together, their raucous voicesduet Very soon they dragged the carcass to a spot about forty yards farther on, where they ate it They roared at intervals during the repast probably as a warning to me not to interfere with theh the spine and thus disabled Her voice was the most terrible of all

There arehabitualbroken up by the brutes It was useless for the unfortunate people to move from one spot to another, as the wane horde wandered for eight yearsbeen driven out by Tshaka It was related to e ho lions followed thelers After a time this was taken quite as a matter of course

I have often seen it stated that lions will not eat carrion This is quite erroneous; I am inclined to think that they occasionally prefer e at the carcass of an ox which had died of tsetse bite, and which had lain putrefying for several days, when there were sick oxen in the i

I was one of those who, in 1874, rescued the fever stricken Alexandre party frohastly caht members, three were dead, and the survivors were so weak and spent that they were unable to do more in the matter of interment than scoop shallow trenches within a few yards of the shelter, lay the bodies of their dead companions therein, and cover them up with sand Yet these were unearthed several ti of a shot would not always scare thearded the unfortunate beings in broad daylight, and then, as though they had deliberately made a choice, proceeded to unearth a corpse

Most of this took place during the absence of the one member of the party as still able to move about, but as he had to fetch water every day in a deht miles distant, he was usually away However, the account of their experiences given by the sick men was amply corroborated by awful but quite indescribable evidence

The rencontre of Morisot and Campbell at Constantinople reminds me of a somewhat similar experience When I was caht fro whether we had, by any chance, a e One of the party, a ored by a buffalo and badly hurt Unfortunately we could give no assistance such as was needed

The accident had been a peculiar one; not alone was the nature of the injury unusual, but so were the circumstances under which it had been inflicted Tyrer, on his way to the cae buffalo On the followinghe went to the locality where the ani up the spoor Here the jungle was very dense Suddenly he caed, and was upon him before he had time even to lift his rifle Tyrer dropped the latter, and, with the strength of desperation, grasped the horns of the an a terrible wrestling e, probably it was old and correspondingly stiff, for on no other grounds can one account for Tyrer having been able to save his life

Gross and unwieldy as it looks, the buffalo in its prionist was apparently unable to bend its neck, and get its head beneath its chest, so Tyrer was for a tiun and clith Tyrer was shaken off and flung in a heap on the ground In an instant the buffalo picked hi him into the air and rushed away The result to poor Tyrer was a terrible injury one which I do not care to describe Some weeks later the injured man was carried past our camp on a litter He was afterwards conveyed to Natal, and thence to Europe, where a skilful operation set hi While there I met an old friend, Charles Currey, then head of the Departed to take a trip together to a place called Struben's Mill, which lay behind soht-hand side of the Main Reef to ard of the Golden City Currey was bent on sketching; I on collecting ferns The afternoon grew hot, and we longed for a cup of tea Seeing a house high up on the hillside, with s from its chimney, we decided to call there and try our luck

We were hospitably received by the e; he at once provided the desired refreshreat deal of the sa reminiscences I told the story about Tyrer, and added that I had often wondered as to what had beco relation with an iot the yarn pretty right My naet Currey's look of astonishs to be reckoned with in the Low Country Looking froe over the immense plains, one was apt to think that these were covered with dense, continuous forest But a closer acquaintance corrected this ie trees and these usually stood so theet a clear view over a radius of about two hundred yards Now and then one reached an area in which the trees were very high indeed, with clean boles running to a height of thirty to forty feet But the ground was covered with long, coarse grass, which was tinted a soft green in summer, but in winter was yellow and dry At all seasons the haulms were so hard that the toes of one's boots wore out with distressing quickness It was in winter that the grass fire becaer

Great tracts perhaps hundreds of squarethe course of one of these, the wind happened to be blowing towards you froer was apt to become real and imminent There was only one alternative; you had either at once to find sorass and there wait until the flaht where you were and then take refuge on the burnt area

Occasionally the trees caught alight and afforded striking spectacles at night I think that when this happened the tree was very old, and a considerable portion of the trunk, fro an extrerass fire that had swept past I returned along the sarass was springing up luxuriantly, it had reached a height of several inches But the tree was still burning I ca on the ard side like a colureat tress of flaotten