We made up a splendid fire after this adventure, and passed the rest of the night in comfort and self-laudation. We could not expect to see much more animal life out of our pit ambushes after all the banging and talking in which we had indulged.
But we heard several hyenas—probably the pilots and squires of Lord Leo, departed—which came around and said a great many things in derisive tones, as it seemed to us; but whether they intended thereby to rejoice over the downfall of a tyrant, or to abuse us for depriving them of their patron and food-provider; or whether, again, they were addressing their remarks to the lion himself, ignorant of his death, and assuring him, wherever he might be, that he was wasting invaluable time, inasmuch as two fat and juicy young men were ready and waiting for his kind attention down by the river, I really cannot say, not knowing hyenese.
But this I know, that once, when Jack and I had both (oh, how imprudently!) just dozed off for a few minutes of repose, I suddenly awoke to the consciousness—like a person in a ghost story—that we were "not alone."
Up I started, and up started Jack also, aroused by the same sound that had awakened me. What was it?—another lion?
Not only was it not another lion, but lion number one had disappeared. We sat up and rubbed our eyes. We stood up and looked carefully around, and asked one another what in the name of all that was mysterious was the meaning of it?
At the sound of our voices there was a scuffle behind the scrub close in front of us, and a pattering of feet; growlings, moanings, yelpings followed the scuffle: and we ran, rifle in hand, to solve the mystery.
There lay our lion, dragged from the spot in which he had died, and there, under the lee of a prickly-pear bush, his friends the hyenas would, in another minute or two, have torn him to pieces.
I did not know then that the hyenas would have eaten their lord and patron. It struck me that they had dragged away his carcass in order to hide it, in honour, from his enemies, perhaps to bury it. I mentioned this to Jack, who laughed rudely.
"Bury it?" he said. "Yes; in their stomachs."
I had conceived quite a wrong idea of the relations between the hyena and the lion, it appeared. The respect of the former for the latter, I now know, though great during life, vanishes with the breath of his nostrils. The hyena flatters and adores the lion while he can roar and kill food for him; but when the lion dies the hyena instantly eats him if he can get hold of the royal carcass.