It goes without saying that lions which have matured in confinement cannot compare with the lions that have come to their full development in the wilderness. Full-grown tigers and leopards are still nowadays in some cases ensnared alive, and we can see them in our zoological gardens in all their native wildness, and without any artificial breeding, marked with the unmistakable stamp common to all wild animals. It is an established fact that all captive monkeys show symptoms after a certain time of rachitis. This is also the case frequently with large felines. Lions brought up in captivity, however, have far finer manes than wild ones.
Of course a certain number of the lions used in the arena-fights in Rome were probably reared in the Roman provinces by some potentate. But without doubt a large number were caught when fully grown by means of nets, pitfalls, and other devices of which we have no precise details.
It seemed to me worth while to make a trial of the means which had once been so successful. As I have already pointed out, there is a great difference between a man who scours the wilderness solely as a hunter, and one who makes practical investigations into the life of the animal world. The sportsman may possibly sneer at the use of pitfalls. He has no mind for anything but an exciting encounter with the lion, an encounter which, thanks to modern means of warfare, is much easier for the man than formerly.
ANOTHER OF MY HUNTING CARDS. THE RECORD OF MY LION-HUNT OF THE 25TH JANUARY, 1897, ON THE ATHI PLAINS, WHEN I KILLED TWO LIONS AND A LIONESS (“LÖWE”=LION; LÖWIN=LIONESS).
However, I have no wish whatever to lay down the law on this question of the relative amount of danger involved in the shooting or the trapping of lions. In many parts of Africa lion-hunting is a matter of luck, above all where horses cannot live owing to the tsetse-fly, and where dogs cannot be employed in large numbers (as used to be the practice in South Africa) to mark down the lions until the hunter can come. For example, we have it on good authority that the members of an Anglo-Abyssinian Border Commission, aided by a pack of dogs, were able to kill about twenty lions in the course of a year. But on entering the region of Lake Rudolf all the dogs fall victims to the tsetse-fly. Hunting with a pack of dogs is very successful. Dogs were used by the three brothers Chudiakow, who, some nine years ago, near Nikolsk on the Amur, in Manchuria, killed nearly forty Siberian tigers in one winter[6]; whilst a hunting party near Vladivostock killed in one month one hundred and twenty-five wild boars and seven tigers. Tigers are so plentiful near Mount Ararat that a military guard of three men is necessary during the night-watch to ward off these beasts of prey.[7]
My extraordinary luck on January 25, 1897, when I killed three full-grown lions, fine big specimens, was of course a source of much satisfaction to me. The little sketch-map of the day’s hunt which accompanies this chapter shows the route I took on that memorable occasion, and gives a good idea of the way in which I am accustomed to keep a record of such things in my diary. I must add that my adventures and narrow escapes while trying to secure lions have been of a kind such as would be to the taste only of those most greedy of excitement.
In 1897 I had already observed that the lion was to be found in great troops in thinly populated neighbourhoods, where he was at no loss for prey and where he had not much to fear from man. As many as thirty lions have been found together, and I myself have seen a troop of fourteen with my own eyes. Other sportsmen have seen still larger troops in East Africa. Quite recently Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, who, on the occasion of his second African trip, made some interesting observations in regard to lions, has borne witness to the existence of very large troops. During the period in which I devoted myself entirely to making photographic studies of wild life, and consequently left undisturbed all the different species of game which swarmed around my camp, I was sometimes surrounded for days, weeks even, by great numbers of them, sometimes to an alarming extent. I have already described how one night an old lion brushed close by my tent to drink at the brook near which we were encamping, although it was just as easy for him to drink from the same stream at any point for miles to either side of us. On another occasion, as could be seen from the tracks, lions approached our camp until within a few yards of it. When I was photographing the lions falling upon the heifers and donkeys, as described in With Flashlight and Rifle, I must have been, judging by the tracks, surrounded by about thirty. I trapped a number of them, either for our various museums, where specimens in various stages of development and age are much needed, or to protect the natives who were menaced by lions, or whose relatives had perhaps been seized by them.
AT BAY.