On the following day we journeyed down the river along the northern or Somáli bank, and made two marches to the neighbourhood of Sen Morettu, halting just opposite the forest at Shendil, where I had unsuccessfully hunted buffalo a few days before. I sent men across on an Adone raft which I had caused to be towed down from Karanleh, but they returned and reported that the buffalo had not come back from the hills. On the short march to Sen Morettu I shot a very fine waterbuck and a Sœmmering’s gazelle, and the next day I shot a waterbuck and a lesser koodoo. I was anxious to get a good specimen of the dól, with a view to having it scientifically identified, so we had all the pitfalls in the neighbouring forest repaired by the Adone; but none of the bushbucks fell in while I was at Sen Morettu.
On the 21st I organised a beat for dól. I saw nothing, but one of the men in the line of beaters, Hadji Adan, shot a fine buck with his Snider. He was in company with a doe, which broke back through the line, hopping over one of the men, hitting his forehead with her hoofs, and so knocking him down! She succeeded in making good her escape, as the other men were too astonished to fire. At sunset I shot another good waterbuck.
I now marched for the coast. The return journey was over ground most of which I have previously described. We passed through several Somáli tribes, all of which were of course friendly. On the way the natives told me that the Abyssinians had received a great defeat from the Danakil tribes near Obok, and that my Abyssinian friend Basha-Basha had been killed; also that war had broken out between the Abyssinians and the Suákin dervishes. But I was unable to verify either of these reports.
During three days I made six marches, covering sixty miles, in a course running almost due north. The only game I saw on these marches was a wart-hog, which appeared staring me in the face at a distance of ten feet, as I was moving through long grass at dawn. The rising sun was shining in his eyes, and I knocked him over stone dead by a shot in the chest before he had time to realise the situation. He had a beautiful pair of tusks, long, thick, and white.
On the morning of the 26th I heard that near a karia ahead of us a man had been lately attacked by a man-eating lion and was not expected to live. I made a short march to the karia and halted for the noon camp close by. At the request of the relations of the sick man, while camp was being pitched, I walked over to the karia with my hunters, carrying a bucket full of carbolic lotion, a quart of carbolic oil, iodoform, lint and bandages, and a syringe. We came to a hut, outside which was a crowd of people; and looking in I saw, lying on the bare ground, the body of a man without any clothing on. He was smeared over the head and body with dust and blood, and had seven or eight deep fang wounds in the small of the back and low down in his left side near the bowel. All these wounds were uncared for, and on closer inspection I found them to be swarming with white maggots! I asked permission to have him carried outside the hut, where it was lighter; but his relations at first objected, saying in his hearing that he was sure to die, it would only give him unnecessary pain, and it was the will of Allah that he should die. The man, however, after some persuasion consented, and as gently as we could we lifted him from the floor of the hut, where he had been lying for the last thirty hours, and laid him on a camel-mat outside.
Having obtained permission to try my best with the medicines I had brought, I first got his wife to wash him all over, the other relations looking on at every movement of the white man with great interest; I don’t think they cared much about the sick man. When he had been washed he looked more cheerful, and turning him over I made a careful examination of the wounds. There were eight deep holes in the small of the back, dangerously near the spine, where the lion had taken him up and dropped him two or three times; and there were a couple of wounds deep in the left side, which had not, fortunately, penetrated the bowel. I told the man that there was no reason, with luck, why he should not recover, and he became quite cheerful, and gave me permission to probe the wounds. His uncle now appeared with a piece of stick having a shred of tobe twisted round it, and with this rough instrument we probed all the wounds, and I syringed them out carefully with carbolic lotion. The bystanders never ceased wondering at the performance of the glass syringe. The wounded man, like a true Somáli, never even murmured during this treatment. At last I was able to let him sit up, clean and almost smiling, all the holes in his body neatly plugged with pieces of lint soaked in carbolic oil; I gave his relations medicine for twenty days’ use, and a new tobe for bandaging, as well as a lecture on further treatment. They never ceased begging for the syringe, but I could not spare that, as we were going through lion country and might want it.
The story of the occurrence, which the natives then told me, was interesting. This man, with twenty other men and boys, had been asleep, two nights before, in a camel karia a few miles away. The camel karias are merely thorn fences round the camels, and there are no huts, the men sleeping on the inside of the fence in the open air. At about five in the morning, just before dawn, a lion sprang into the zeríba and seized this man, his companions making off, and the camels stampeding into the darkness. The man’s own account of what occurred then follows. He struck at the lion frantically with his hands, and the brute let him go, retiring to a little distance to watch him. The lion came on again, taking him up a second time and carrying him a few yards to the edge of the fence. Again the man struck out at the lion and he let go. A third time he took him up, and again the man, who was nearly exhausted, drove him off; and the lion, either frightened away by the dawn of day or impressed at the spirit shown by his victim, sneaked off. The man remembered no more till his friends returned some time afterwards, expecting to find only a few bones; and they carried him to the home karia and threw him into a hut to die, the thought of giving him food or washing the blood and dust from him not occurring to them; and there he had lain for thirty hours. To this day I have never heard whether or not he recovered, but having seen instances of wonderful recoveries among Somális, I am inclined to think he had a very good chance, that is, provided his relations used the carbolic lotion and did not steal the white tobe directly my back was turned.
On the evening of the same day I made another short march, and arrived at a place where a leopard had just killed a goat while the flocks were returning from pasture to a karia. We hastily constructed a shelter, and I sat two yards from one of my own goats, which I had tied up as a bait, with the wind blowing in my face, and the two hunters at my side with spare rifles. There was a faint moon, and at about nine o’clock a leopard charged the goat and killed it. I sat quietly till the hubbub had subsided, and then, as the leopard lay on the goat sucking its blood, with its back to me and its tail twitching close to my feet, I fired for the centre of its back, and it rolled over stone dead, with its four paws in the air, beside its victim. We raised a cheer, and all the men coming from camp, we carried it to the door of my tent and skinned it by the light of torches.
Next morning, as I had had good sport with the leopard, before marching I gave the women at the karias a large present of beads. Directly they knew that I had given the beads to Adan Yusuf to be distributed, they all rushed at him like tigresses, and in a fright he dropped the beads and fled. The women fought and wrangled till we had loaded and marched away. Several of the old men came to me and said that now I had given the beads the women would be quarrelling with each other for days, and would neglect the cattle, and require to be well beaten before things settled down again. As we marched off through the bush I shot a prowling hyæna.
On the 28th, while I was marching ahead of the caravan with the two hunters, I saw a herd of seven Waller’s gazelles and began stalking them. While we were still two hundred yards away, three leopards charged into the middle of the herd and killed a young doe before our eyes, scattering the others in every direction. We ran up to where the leopards were squatting over the carcase, in the middle of a broad open glade, but while we were still some distance away they saw us and all three made off at a canter. I think they were ordinary leopards, and not the long-legged, pale-skinned hunting leopard (the chítah of India). I fired at one of them and missed, and then we sat by the side of the dead Walleri till the caravan came up, hoping to see the brutes, but they never returned.