Long Odds | Page 7

of my head when I caught sight in the
moonlight of the lioness bounding along through the long grass, and
after her a couple of cubs about the size of mastiffs. She stopped within
a few feet of my head, and stood, waved her tail, and fixed me with her
glowing yellow eyes; but just as I thought that it was all over she turned
and began to feed on Kaptein, and so did the cubs. There were the four
of them within eight feet of me, growling and quarrelling, rending and
tearing, and crunching poor Kaptein's bones; and there I lay shaking
with terror, and the cold perspiration pouring out of me, feeling like
another Daniel come to judgment in a new sense of the phrase.
Presently the cubs had eaten their fill, and began to get restless. One
went round to the back of the waggon and pulled at the Impala buck
that hung there, and the other came round my way and commenced the
sniffing game at my leg. Indeed, he did more than that, for, my trouser
being hitched up a little, he began to lick the bare skin with his rough
tongue. The more he licked the more he liked it, to judge from his
increased vigour and the loud purring noise he made. Then I knew that
the end had come, for in another second his file-like tongue would have
rasped through the skin of my leg--which was luckily pretty tough--and
have drawn the blood, and then there would be no chance for me. So I
just lay there and thought of my sins, and prayed to the Almighty, and
reflected that after all life was a very enjoyable thing.
"Then of a sudden I heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting and
whistling of men, and there were the two boys coming back with the
cattle, which they had found trekking along all together. The lions
lifted their heads and listened, then bounded off without a sound--and I
fainted.
"The lions came back no more that night, and by the next morning my
nerves had got pretty straight again; but I was full of wrath when I
thought of all that I had gone through at the hands, or rather noses, of
those four brutes, and of the fate of my after-ox Kaptein. He was a
splendid ox, and I was very fond of him. So wroth was I that like a fool

I determined to attack the whole family of them. It was worthy of a
greenhorn out on his first hunting trip; but I did it nevertheless.
Accordingly after breakfast, having rubbed some oil upon my leg,
which was very sore from the cub's tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who
did not half like the business, and having armed myself with an
ordinary double No. 12 smoothbore, the first breechloader I ever had, I
started. I took the smoothbore because it shot a bullet very well; and
my experience has been that a round ball from a smoothbore is quite as
effective against a lion as an express bullet. The lion is soft, and not a
difficult animal to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body. A buck
takes far more killing.
"Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to
discover whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day. About three
hundred yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with
single mimosa trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond
this lay a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole,
which covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with
reeds, now in the sere and yellow leaf. From the further edge of this
pan the ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had
been cut out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled
with bush, amongst which grew some large trees, I forget of what sort.
"It at once struck me that the dry pan would be a likely place to find my
friends in, as there is nothing a lion is fonder of than lying up in reeds,
through which he can see things without being seen himself.
Accordingly thither I went and prospected. Before I had got half-way
round the pan I found the remains of a blue vilderbeeste that had
evidently been killed within the last three or four days and partially
devoured by lions; and from other indications about I was soon assured
that if the family were not in the pan that day they spent a good deal of
their spare time there. But if there, the question was how to get them