The following day we arrived at a deep well called Garbo. As we approached this well we saw vultures swooping towards two or three dead trees which overtopped the jungle, and searching about we found the bodies of a leopard and seven spotted hyænas, which had been poisoned during the night by a Midgán. He had drawn up water from the deep well and exposed it for the night in a shallow wooden bowl,[49] mixed with poison which he had concocted from various herbs. The success of his manœuvre was evident. The leopard had been half eaten by the hyænas, but I preserved the skull.
The natives whom we found encamped near here were very suspicious and surly, as they had had some disagreement with Prince Ruspoli’s caravan which had passed through before me. As we marched in the afternoon I left Hadji Adan with four men, and three camels loaded with water-casks, to follow us with a good supply of water. We had only gone a mile when we heard several shots fired in quick succession, and all running back to the wells, we found my men in sole possession. The natives had refused to allow them to take any water, and my men, instead of returning and complaining to me as they should have done, thinking to have a bit of fun, had fired a few shots over the heads of the crowd, sending them flying, with a worse impression of European caravans than they had before. I was naturally very angry and disgusted with Hadji Adan, who looked sheepish when I told him, in choice language, what I thought of him. On this march I fired three shots with my Lee-Metford rifle at a beautiful oryx bull which was galloping away. When he was already three hundred yards distant my third shot brought him down, and we camped by the body to take full advantage of the supply of meat.
Next day we made two hard marches to Daba-Jérissa, where I remained on 1st October, shooting a fine lesser koodoo buck. The people at Daba-Jérissa asked me to give judgment, in my capacity of Englishman, as to the amount of blood-money to be paid by another tribe for the murder of one of their number; but I said I would only arbitrate if both parties would appeal to me as a disinterested stranger, and that I could not undertake to act for the British Government, especially so far from Berbera.[50]
On 2nd October we made two long marches to the wells at Sassamani, where guinea-fowl swarmed in tens of thousands, blackening the river-bed as they came to drink in the evenings; and I had good sport here with the gun. On the way I attacked a herd of Sœmmering’s gazelles with the Lee-Metford, and dropped four bucks with six shots, at ranges between two hundred and fifty and three hundred yards. I gave most of the meat to some people whom we found at the wells, instead of a present of cloth which they asked me for.
On 5th October we arrived at the Gagáb wells at Milmil. Here I arranged a division of the caravan into two parts, sending one portion to Berbera by the shortest route, so that the men might be paid off and the camels sold; and I kept the other portion to accompany me in a leisurely journey to the coast by way of the Eidegalla Haud, where I hoped to get some lions. We left Milmil on the 6th of October and marched to a Rer Ali karia, and on the following day we made two marches to a large water-pan at Awáré. As no rain had fallen for months in this locality till quite recently, the pan was dry, but a deep well sunk through its bed contained plenty of water. The pan at Awáré is an isolated depression far out on the Haud Plateau, which contains rain-water for several weeks at a time. It is three marches to the north of Milmil, the last Ogádén watering-place on the southern edge of the Haud; and when the pan, or the well which the natives sink through its bed, contains water, the flocks and camels of the Rer Ali and Rer Harún are brought to Awáré to take advantage of the rich Haud pastures, which have better fattening qualities than those of Milmil. While passing through the Rer Ali grazing camels, of which there were many hundreds, on our way to the pan, we were all much amused by watching my hunter Geli, who was walking in front with my spare rifle over his shoulder. Before he joined me he had often, with the rest of his tribe, who were the Eidegalla, made looting excursions on horseback to this part of the Haud. As he walked on, looking at the fat humps of the camels to right and left, he wore an angelic smile on his face, and sang softly, “Hilib badan ai-y-ee ee” (Lots of meat, plenty of meat!) When he turned round and saw the whole caravan laughing at him he stopped and looked sheepish.
Geli was a capital fellow, and my men used to tell a story about him which he never contradicted. It appears that when only sixteen years old he was out looking after goats with his mother and sisters. A lion bolted off with one of the flock, and Geli, with the women, began idly to track him up, to see if he had gone far; because, if the lion was not far off, it might be worth while to call up the men from the karia to follow him. Geli went on ahead, and found the lion asleep under a bush, having eaten the goat. Geli decided to go and tell the tribe, but as he was turning away he thought he would just throw his spear, it looked so easy! He aimed at the lion’s ribs, hurled his spear, and then ran for his karia as hard as he could go; and coming back to look with twenty men on horseback, he found the lion dead.
The Haud in this locality is one mass of unbroken thorn forest, sometimes light and open, sometimes very dense, with high durr grass. Round the Awáré pan the forest is composed of very fine gudá thorn-trees, which grow for about fifteen feet without branches, and then shoot up and outwards in a fan-shape to a height of from thirty to forty feet The bark is black, and the foliage is made up of small star-shaped leaves, massed together and very green. It is the most picturesque tree in the Haud forest, and nothing can be prettier than the Awáré pan when the margin of open, flat meadow-land is covered with a carpet of fresh turf, and the trees are in foliage. On arriving at Awáré we pitched camp under a large gudá tree at the north-west corner of the pan, and I made my bed on the flat top of another on the eastern side, and tied up a donkey below. Lions roared in the forest a mile or two away, but did not come near the camp.
Next morning, without waiting for coffee, I got down from the tree and made straight for where we had heard the lions. About three miles from our tree we came on the fresh tracks of a large lion and lioness, and followed them. The bush was rather open, and the lioness must have been doing sentry and have seen us,[51] for we could hear her roaring in the jungle some distance ahead of us as she roused her mate; and running on in the direction of the noise, we were just in time to see a very large black-maned lion bound out of a thicket and make off, followed by a lioness. The grass was rather long, only showing their heads, and owing to intervening thorn-trees and the distance, I could not get a chance to shoot. We tracked these lions until a heavy shower of rain came on and lost us the tracks in the afternoon. I was hungry and suffering from a galled foot, and we were twice drenched with rain before we got home.
I lay at night on the top of the gudá tree near camp, but did not get a shot. A lion roared several times, early in the night, in the distance, but a shower of rain coming on before dawn, the people whom I sent out from camp failed to find his tracks.
On the 9th we moved the camp to a karia a few miles to the north-west, where lions were reported to be common. I sat all night in the top of a tree over a heifer tethered below, to no purpose. Next morning we came upon tracks of two lionesses and three cubs; but we only found them at 8 A.M., and the enormous flocks and herds of the Rer Ali had wandered about the jungle in every direction, and almost entirely obliterated the signs, so we gave it up; and we moved camp back to the former site at the Awáré pan. In the evening news of lions came from two opposite directions, south-west and north-east. I sent several horsemen out to verify the first, and I sent Hassan five miles to the south-east to the carcase of a camel which had been struck down by the lions, and ordered him to sit in a tree all night, and keep hyænas from the carcase by throwing stones at it. He had seen a lioness bound away as he came up to the spot at sunset, and sitting in a galól tree waiting for the brute’s return, he spent a most miserable night, for it rained heavily, and became so dark that a mob of hyænas dragged away the meat in spite of his stoning. In the morning, because of this rain, Hassan failed to find any tracks; so he returned to my camp, aching all over, for a rotten and twisted galól tree covered with large black ants is not a comfortable perch on a cold night. The horsemen whom I sent to the south-west reported the lion news to be a hoax of the karia people there, concocted in the hope of obtaining bakshísh.[52] During the day I received a visit from some Rer Ali headmen and minstrels, who serenaded me on foot while I was trying to get a little sleep at noon.