Lions kill and eat every kind of wild animal in Africa with the exception of the Pachydermata—though they occasionally catch and kill a young elephant or rhinoceros that has been separated from its mother—but as long as buffaloes and zebras are plentiful in the countries they inhabit, they will kill far more of these than of any other animal. Quaggas and Burchell's zebras probably formed their chief food on the plains of the Cape Colony, the Orange River Colony, and the Transvaal before those countries were settled by Europeans; whilst farther north, where great numbers of buffaloes frequented the neighbourhood of every river, the lions lived almost entirely on these animals, following the herds in all their wanderings, just as in North America the prairie wolves were always in attendance on the bisons. Giraffes are sometimes killed by lions, but according to my experience only very rarely; no doubt because they must be very awkward animals to pull down, and also for the reason that, generally speaking, they inhabit dry, waterless stretches of country, throughout which game is usually only sparsely distributed and into which lions do not penetrate.
Although I have excluded the Pachydermata from the list of animals on which lions prey, there nevertheless seems to be good evidence that these carnivora do sometimes attack and kill good-sized cow elephants.
I well remember an old Boer hunter, Michael Engelbreght, telling me of an unsuccessful attack made by lions on a cow elephant within a short distance of the shooting hole where he was lying one night watching for elephants coming to drink at Tamasanka vley on the old road to the Zambesi. This incident had occurred only a few nights before I met Engelbreght at the vley in question. But it happened so long ago (in 1874) that I cannot remember anything more than that the elephant was held up by the lions for some hours, and that the trumpeting of the former was accompanied by the loud growling of the latter, and that when my informant examined the ground where the combat had taken place, the next morning, he found a great deal of thorn bush trampled down by the elephant, and some blood on the ground. The former, however, although probably it had been badly bitten in the trunk and legs, had kept the lions from its throat, and had finally beaten them off and made good its retreat. Michael Engelbreght was at that time a man of over sixty years of age, and as he had been a hunter from his youth upwards, in the golden days of South African hunting, he must have had a vast experience of the habits of wild animals, but I well remember that he spoke of this incident of an elephant having been attacked by lions as wonderful and almost incredible.
I have, however, heard of another case of an elephant having been attacked and killed by lions.
When passing through Kimberley in 1895, I met my old friend Mr. F. S. Arnot, who has done such splendid work as a pioneer missionary in Central Africa, and who is an absolutely reliable man, and he then told me a story of an elephant having been killed by lions near Lake Mweru. Hearing last year that Mr. Arnot was in England, I wrote and asked him if he would kindly tell me this story again, as I wanted to put it on record. In the course of his answer to my letter Mr. Arnot wrote: "The lion story I told you may appear rather tall to some, but when travelling between Lakes Tanganyika and Mweru, in November 1894, and when skirting the northern end of the great Mweru Marsh—a regular elephants' stronghold—my men suddenly left me en masse—they were a raw set of men—returning presently with elephant flesh. They then told me that our guides having informed them that they had that morning seen six hungry lions attack and pull down a full-grown cow elephant, just ahead of where we then were, they had left me so suddenly in order to drive the lions off and get some meat. Unfortunately, I did not see the lions myself, but there could be no doubt about the truth of our guides' statement, for I saw the lions' spoor and the carcase of the dead elephant. The tusks were very small, but my men brought them. They may have weighed from four to five pounds each."
As the tusks were so small, this elephant could hardly have been a full-grown cow; but it must have been a good-sized animal, probably a young cow about three-parts grown. It is a great pity that Mr. Arnot did not examine the carcase carefully and ascertain exactly how the elephant had been killed. As the natives, however, asserted positively that they had seen six lions attack and kill it, and as Mr. Arnot is fully convinced that their story was true, I think it ought to be accepted as a fact, especially as cases of full-grown elephants having been killed by tigers in India and Burma have been put on record.
CHAPTER IV
NOTES ON THE LION (continued)