It was not of much use to look, for the night was pitch dark; but I may say that afterwards, by the firelight, I was somewhat shocked to observe that Jack's Norfolk jacket about the left shoulder was torn to shreds, and that his arm was considerably scratched beneath it. If the pit had been an inch or two shallower, Jack's arm would have been lacerated in a fearful way; as it was, the brute only just touched him.
We found the lion was as dead as a post when we had fired some brushwood and were able to examine him, which we did without loss of time, for it was unpleasant to feel that the brute might possibly be still alive, and gathering up his dying energies for a little vendetta, to be enacted upon us so soon as one of us should come within grabbing distance of that tremendous mouth of his!
I confess that I was very proud and happy over that dead lion. It was "my bird" undoubtedly; for though Jack was a crack shot and had fired both barrels at it, at a distance of about ten paces, or not much more, yet he had missed it clean. He could not see the end of his rifle, he explained, and had simply pointed the weapon according to the grace that was in him, hoping for the best results. The results were a clean miss and a big lion sitting, as he picturesquely put it, on the top of his head and digging at his arm. As a matter of fact, I believe this is what happened: the lion, enraged by the shot, instantly sprang towards the only visible thing that it could see, which was the white smoke of Jack's rifle.
It had alighted with its great carcass stretched over the pit, the hind legs short of the aperture, head and shoulders beyond it, but one of its front legs happened to fall just inside the hole; and it was in struggling to regain its footing and draw its great arm out of the mysterious hole into which it had fallen, that the brute spoiled Jack's coat and very nearly spoiled his arm and shoulder as well.
My shots came at the right moment, and the mystery which that lion must have already felt to exist with regard to the banging and the hole in the ground, and things in general, was, for that lion, never solved. He went away to the Happy Hunting Grounds with his last moments in this world made mysterious by unguessable and incomprehensible riddles, leaving me a very proud and elated young person.
Perhaps other lions who have been shot by a visible creature, and with whom my first victim has by this time scraped acquaintance in those shady retreats, have now explained it all for him, and have described what an artful, tricky, fire-spitting, incomprehensible race are we humans, who have about as much strength in our whole bodies as lions have in one muscle of their forearms, but who can nevertheless spit fire at a lion from the other end of nowhere, and burn him up in an instant from out of sight.
CHAPTER XX
OUR TRUSTY NIGGER TO THE RESCUE
We did not attempt to skin that lion, for the best of reasons—because we did not know how.
Simple Jack was very much inclined to try, because, said he, it could not be very difficult. He had heard that if one cut it straight down the proper place one could pull the whole skin clean off over the beast's head, like a fellow having his football jersey pulled off after a match. But I did not encourage his enterprising spirit in this matter, because I did not think Jack's theory would "come off," or the lion's skin either.