A great yellow-beaked hornbill sat on a tree and made his own peculiar croaking noise. Most wise he looked as he put his grey head to one side and investigated us. Yet his looks bewrayed him; for when I threw some dates at him to see if he knew how to catch them in his beak, he let them pass him all unheeded. His cousin at the Zoo could teach many things.
After a long ride we left our ponies to be led along behind by a syce, and spoored on foot. Clarence and the two hunters were still riding. We nearly went off our heads with joy and excitement when we suddenly came on a neat little path made by lion. The print was perfect. The most perfect I have ever seen. The soft earth had taken the mould like dough. There were the fore indents, there the cushions of the pad. We knelt down in our eagerness to realise how really soaked everything was. The ground was sodden, and every step oozed water.
We ran on, Clarence and the hunters keeping pace easily with us. There were scrubby bushes all about, but the pugs threaded in and out, and held plainly on, until they ended in a vast pile of stones and brushwood. An ideal lair. Clearly our quarry was run to earth. With a “whuff” two mighty animals leapt up, over the stones and away, just for all the world like a couple of agile common or garden cats. Cecily and I flew after them. I don’t think I ever ran so hard in my life before. I might have been the pursued rather than the pursuer. The ground opened up to great plateau country, and the lion and lioness were cantering close together, almost touching shoulders. Making a detour Clarence and the hunters rounded the great cats up. For a moment it almost seemed that they pulled up dead as the gallant little ponies dashed by them, but a man is fairly safe on a galloping pony. I laid this flattering well-known unction to my soul as I saw the lion go for “The Baron,” whilst the lioness simply broke away, and vanished in that marvellous manner of disappearing which lions know the secret of.
With quivering tail extended, and most horrible coughing snarls the lion seemed about to disprove the idea that he was no match for a mounted horseman. But away and away dashed the sporting little pony, and His Majesty turned his terrific attentions to us, and in a whirl of tossed-up mud came to within forty yards of the place where Cecily and I stood in the open, rigid and awaiting the onslaught. Then we let him have it. I saw his tremendous head over my sights as in short bounds he cleared the distance that separated us. I fired simultaneously with my cousin.
I was using the heavy 12-bore, but I kept my fingers on the rear trigger as we advanced cautiously to the dropped lion. He crumpled up like a toy with the mainspring broken, and sank as he finished his last spring with his massive head between his paws—a majestic and magnificent sight.
I measured him previous to the skinning operation and, stretched out, from his nose to the end of his tail he touched seven feet ten and a half inches. Of course this was before rigor-mortis had set in, and he may have stretched a little. His mane was shorter than our other damaged lion trophy, and entirely clear from the patches of mange we found on one or two other lions we bagged. But he was infested with ticks. I should think life must have been an irritating affair for him.
We were immensely set up, and only regretted that the lioness had made good her escape. One of the most extraordinary features about lions to me is the way so large an animal can obliterate itself; they simply blend into the landscape. Their brownish-yellow skins, so similar in colour to the burnt grass, and their agile bodies, which can crouch and wriggle like any lizard, play parts in the scheme for invisibility. On one occasion Cecily and I surprised a lion in a small nullah. (We were a trifle astonished ourselves, too, but that is a detail.) We ran in pursuit, being out of range, and though we kept our eyes fixed on him, or thought we did, that lion seemed to disappear as suddenly as though the earth had swallowed him up. Then Clarence pointed out to us a patch of brown grass, taller than the rest—any amateur like myself would have sworn it was grass. “Libbah,” our man said impressively. And “libbah” it was. We approached and the “grass” with a bound was off! We bagged him in the end, and he was a very old creature indeed. Alone, and almost toothless, his day was almost spent, and he died more royally at our hands than ending as the ignominious prey of some hyæna. He put me in mind of a wonderful lion picture I saw once at the Academy, which portrayed an old, old lion, at twilight, in his own beloved haunts, weak and doddering, yet still a king—too strong even yet to be pulled down by the lurking forms, which with lurid eyes watched the dying lion from the dark thorn background. I think the picture was called “Old Age.”