Presently a party of horsemen appeared galloping towards us, now and then hidden by the rolling ground, and arriving in front of our party they circled their ponies, and giving the complimentary “Mót!” they came up and shook hands. They informed us that they had marked down three lions in the grass, on the open plain, eight miles away in the Jifa direction; and they assured us the lions would be found in the same place, as six horsemen had been placed to form a cordon round them, and they would be afraid to move from the shelter of a patch of rather high grass. The men said that these lions must have been living within the edge of the Jifa bush, prowling out on the great plains at night in order to stalk the herds of antelopes, and that they must have killed something the night before, and being gorged and lazy, the break of day had caught them while still in the open, on their way back to the bush to lie up for the day. These horsemen had been on their way to Ujawáji from Jifa to perform the dibáltig at our camp, but seeing the lions, and knowing that we were keen to get at them, they had circled them in, and compelled them to sit down on the plain and wait for us. Posting six vedettes, they had then come to give us the news.
It was now about one o’clock and very hot, but we pressed on, resisting all temptation to fire at any of the game around us for fear of disturbing the lions; for a shot can be heard at a great distance on these plains. Towards four o’clock we saw one of the vedettes looming out of the haze, and then another. It was, however, a long time before we could make out the lions, which these men were trying to point out to us. They were five hundred yards away, trying to take shelter from the pitiless sun in a patch of grass about two feet high; all we could see being two indistinct dark spots half hidden in grass, and on one of these moving slightly, we recognised it to be the head of a remarkably fine lion. Beyond the lions, more than half a mile away, was another horseman, sitting motionless in the saddle, and looking like a waving palm-tree, the horse’s legs appearing to be elongated in the haze and mirage.
The Somális who had been watching the brutes said they had been in this spot all day, getting up to roar now and then, but, knowing by experience the powers of the Somáli horsemen in the open, they had not attempted to make a bolt of it towards the distant bush, which loomed up in a quivering blue line some ten miles to the north of us. Considering the heat of the sun, and that they had neither food nor water, these horsemen had stuck to the lions with great perseverance, and we felt that we owed it to them to crown their hard work by straight shooting.
We guessed that the brutes must be in an uncommonly bad temper after having been kept out in the full glare of the sun for ten hours; for lions like to sleep under the shade of dense bush during the heat of the day. The grass in this part of the plain was fresh and green, and looked almost like an English lawn, there having been rain about three weeks before. We dismounted, and my brother and I, each accompanied by one Somáli, walked towards the lions.
The account of what followed is taken partly from what I saw, and partly from E⸺’s verbal description; for, being unconscious part of the time, I was not in a condition to know all that passed.
As we approached within two hundred and fifty yards there was a commotion in the grass—a fine black-maned lion sprang out, and was immediately followed by another, nearly as large, but with a yellow mane. They both stood up and looked back at us for a moment and then trotted away. We walked after them, hoping they would lie down again; but as we passed to the right of the patch of grass where they had been lying, and at about a hundred yards’ distance from it, I saw a lioness stretched out flat, with her head between her paws. She was facing us, and as we passed her she rose for a moment, and then glanced towards the retreating lions, but she crouched down again, her head just visible above the grass, and never ceased growling savagely. We went straight on at the same pace, till we were between her and the line of retreat. She was growling louder and louder, and I walked across her front to get a chance at her left shoulder, while E⸺ stood ready, when she rose, to fire at her chest. We stood seventy yards apart, the lioness being seventy yards from each of us, our three positions thus forming an equilateral triangle. The lioness moved, and E⸺, calling out that he could see her chest, immediately fired.
The bullet hit her too high, and, as we afterwards found out, in the withers clear of the spine, the wound causing her to spin round like a top several times in a cloud of red dust, as if hunting her own tail, so that I could see nothing to fire at. From the disturbance in the grass and the savage growls, we decided she must be mortally hit, and were preparing to walk up to her, when suddenly from the obscuring dust she came out, charging for me at full speed. She ran extended along the ground, like a greyhound, and came so fast that I had only time to raise my rifle, and when the bead of the foresight was somewhere under her chin, I fired. Quickly shifting my finger to the left trigger when she was only five yards away, I pulled again, and then jumped to one side, the rifle still at my shoulder. I remember nothing more, except that her head came through the smoke and I was half conscious of being lifted off my feet and sent flying through the air, with the lioness hanging on to my shoulder, growling horribly!
On coming to, I found that I was standing up streaming with blood, and E⸺ and the two hunters were helping me off with my shirt, the lioness lying dead on the grass at my feet. There were eight deep fang wounds in my right arm and shoulder.[23] My brother probed them with a bit of stick wrapped in a shred of tobe; and then we looked around for the lions, and saw that they were no longer visible; but E⸺ said that all the horsemen had followed them, intending to ride them to a standstill and force them to come to bay.
My wounds, owing probably to the severe shock and weakness from loss of blood, gave me no pain, and when a Somáli came galloping back and offered my brother a pony, saying that the lions had come to a standstill, I begged him not to bother, but to try and bag the big black one. I remember hearing E⸺ gallop away, and then I must have fainted.
When I came to again, I saw my hunter, Jáma, sitting near me on the body of the lioness, unconcernedly scrubbing his teeth with a bit of athei stick, which he must have brought from Ujawáji. He said he had been waiting for me to wake, and to tell him what was to be done next. The other “Sahib” had gone away, but Jáma had heard a very distant shot, and concluded he must have come up with the lions again. But he advised me to wait for the caravan, which he could see coming over the plain from the east, and mount a camel before trying to go any farther.