The air was stifling, and oh! how heavily I weighed on my knees! My fighting weight seemed enormous as I supported it. It was eight stone really and seemed like eighteen, but of course it was because, in my excitement, Antæus-like, I pressed down heavily to something solid until I drew my strength from earth, and thus took heart of grace. I carefully got up my rifle. It seemed a long business. Did I really make no noise? Strange crackling rustlings sounded in my ears, as at each growl I seized the opportunity, and in the semi-obscurity of the reverberations placed myself better. The lion came more into focus. I saw his side where it sank in, then—farther. A heart-shaking second. My bullet was too low. The vast body lashed round and round. I seemed to see what my fate would be in another instant. My breath was coming in great sobs, and I wondered whether the lion was choking or I. All this was in the fraction of a moment. Then came my opportunity. His chest presented itself fair and square like a target. I pressed my second trigger, and then threw myself backwards and went anyhow as though the devil himself was after me; like a streak of greased lightning. “You kill um libbah?” asked Clarence, who remained pretty much as I had last seen him.
“I don’t know,” I gasped, stupidly enough.
And neither did I.
Loading up carefully again, I carefully retraced my steps, Clarence crawling after me. There was no sound. All was still as death. We crept on until we reached my coign of vantage, and there ahead, prone, motionless, lay a great yellow mass, some ten yards nearer than at my first shot. He was dead indeed, and a very fine specimen of his kind. Strangely enough, he had one eye missing, the hall-mark of some early battle, and to this fact I possibly owed much of the credit I had been taking to myself for my stalk. Then began the usual modus operandi for the animal’s dismemberment, and I cleared out of the place to find that Cecily had taken the injured man back to camp, propping him up on her pony with the help of the second hunter. My pony was amusing itself at some distance, having dragged its moorings, and I caught him after a bit of a tussle.
The invalid was given my tent, which smelt like concentrated essence of High Churchism. Keating’s incense smouldered in one corner and burning carbolic powder fought it for the mastery. Puzzled mosquitoes buzzed in and out, but more out than in, thanks be. The man’s leg was torn in strips which hung in two or three inch lengths, fleshy and horrible. We arranged the torn shreds back, like patching an ornament minus the seccotine. We covered the wounds with iodoform—very amateurishly of course—and then bandaged it. Altogether I think the invalid was rather pleased with himself, as he lay up in the cache-tent, feeling, doubtless, the importance of having been in the jaws of a lion and come out alive from such a gin.
As we could not move him for several days, we arranged to form quite a good zareba, strong and comfortable, round our follower, and make flying excursions of which it should be the base. The wounded hunter proved a very unwilling dawdler, being an active-souled creature, and did not take at all kindly to a life of enforced idleness. He acted like an irritated vegetable, and only slept and drowsed the hours away, and kept his leg up, because I solemnly told him he would die if he did not. I think the active spirits in nations not yet civilised are always the better. Laziness is demoralising anywhere, and with it one soon harks back to the animal. Energetic souls are never idle from choice. The power to idle successfully and with comfort must be inborn. During his days of illness our charge grew really attached to us, and looked for our coming with an expansive smile of welcome. We kept the fever down with quinine, and before many weeks were over his scars were healed into cicatrices, which, of course, he could never lose. They would, however, be a glorious asset and advertisement, showing such undoubted zeal, and should commend the proprietor to any one on the look-out for a truly sporting hunter.
While I was examining the skull and wet skin of the lion as Clarence pegged it out, our cook volunteered the information that the butler had gone again on a still better camel, with the same driver, but minus a rifle. I had thought he would settle down to a dreary acceptance of the position. It really was uncomfortable to harbour two such unwilling people in our otherwise contented caravan, so we decided they were better gone even at the cost of a camel, and this time we wasted no energy on trying to retrieve them. Whether they ever made safety again we never could find out. Their movements from that hour were wrapped in mystery, and the butler, the driver, and the camel disappeared for ever from our ken. They must have wanted to go very badly. It was not complimentary, but we put as good a face on the crusher as we could.