I went out for a stroll on the evening of 1st March from Camp Gebili, quite alone, and walked along the sandy river-bed, which is surrounded by rocky and bush-covered country; and here I saw a hyæna rolling about in the sand, one hundred and fifty yards away; and pitching up my rifle I hit him, breaking his back, and walking up I finished his violent struggles with a ball from my pistol. As I reached my tent a large panther was heard coughing in the jungle to the east, no doubt prowling round camp looking for one of my goats; so we tied up a kid a hundred yards from my tent on the slope of the river bank, and raising a small screen of thorn branches, I sat up with my hunter Géli, five yards from the goat, to watch for the panther by the light of the rising moon. After an hour, just as we had begun to get tired of watching, and were nodding off to sleep, the panther charged the goat and carried it away. The loop-hole which we had prepared in our brushwood screen had been too small, allowing no room laterally for a moving shot.
The panther carried away the kid at a gallop, and we rushed after him in the moonlight over the rocky ground and scrub, and made him drop it when he had gone some two hundred yards from camp; we then dragged the carcase back and secured it in the same place, tying its leg with a stout rope to a stake hammered into the ground, the rope being smeared with muddy water to make it less conspicuously white. We also fastened a live goat by the side of the dead one.
After another wait of half an hour Hassan the Midgán, who sat on my left, touched me gently and pointed. Looking up I saw a panther’s head five yards from the goat, gray and ghostlike, and next second in a flash he had sprung on the live goat’s neck, but finding it fastened to the stake he let go and bounded on, giving no time for a shot. I searched all next day in the thick ergín jungle round camp, but failed to put him up, but we found a cave which had evidently been his lair.
On the next night I again went for a walk along the river-bed alone, and saw the mate of the hyæna I had killed the night before; but I held my fire for fear of driving away any panthers or leopards from the neighbourhood.
I sat up again, and at eight o’clock, while it was still nearly dark, a large leopard charged the goat at full gallop, and I fired without looking along the sights, the light being too dim for me to see the platinum bead. I fired a snap-shot with my eyes thrown upon the bait as the grey silhouette of the leopard pounced on to it, and pulled the trigger at random as it for a moment obscured the white form of the goat; the leopard left the goat struggling and bounded away across the river. The smoke hung heavily, and even when it had cleared away I could only make out the white outline of the goat in front, lying in its death throes; beyond that the black silhouette of the bush-covered hill, and the white light in the sky which would soon be replaced by the disc of the rising moon. I distinctly heard the leopard spring up the hill on the other side of the river; and then she stopped, growling at intervals, and evidently badly wounded, for I could hear the cracking branches of the thorn bushes and the sound of displaced stones as she rolled about.
I went to camp and fetched a lantern and several men; and taking up the tracks, holding the lantern close to the ground, we found a great deal of blood and shreds of her stomach which had been dropped as she had galloped across the river-bed. We held a whispered conference, and decided that if we waited till the morning to follow her up, with this fearful wound she might die in the night and hyænas would spoil the skin. Several men then began throwing small stones up on to the hillside amongst the bushes where we thought she must be lying, but she refused to show her hiding-place.
The Somális offered to form line and drive her out by the light of the moon. I tried to show them the foolhardiness of this; but as they were bent on it, and further hesitation on my part would have been misinterpreted, I arranged a line of twelve men with Snider carbines, and placing myself at its head, we cautiously worked up the hillside. The leopard was very quiet now, and gave no sign. The moon was getting brighter, as it had risen well above the horizon clear of the hill and bushes, shining down into our faces as we ascended.
The men were straggling and would not keep proper line, in spite of my constant directions. We had made three unsuccessful casts up and down the hill, when the leopard charged down from the top, with a coughing roar, right in our faces. The men bunched up round me and I could not fire,—indeed no one had time to fire. She came down the hill in three or four tremendous bounds, and the next second her shadowy form had sprung on Esmán Abdi, who was next to me on the left, and leopard and man, locked together, rolled down the hill, brushing past my leg. Libán Gúri, the man on the farther side of Esmán Abdi, placed the muzzle of his carbine against the leopard’s shoulder, actually singeing the skin, the bullet passing through the leopard and ricochetting within a few inches of my foot, scattering the gravel over me; the brute let go Esmán Abdi, or rather Esmán let go her, for he had had her safe by the throat from the first; and she rolled over in her last agony, fixing her claws into everything within reach, until I fired with the muzzle against her ribs and settled her.
Esmán ran down the hill, and we all followed him, calling out to know how much he was wounded; and when we overtook him he said he wasn’t running from the shabél, but was very much afraid of our bullets! He was badly clawed about the arms, but having caught the leopard by the throat in the first rush, and never let go his hold, he had got off without feeling her teeth, although he had several abrasions from falling among the rocks.
We took the leopard to my tent and skinned it by firelight, while by the same fire I dressed Esmán Abdi’s wounds with carbolic oil. The first shot fired at the leopard as she charged the goat had taken her in the centre of the belly, and torn quite half of the intestines away, and with this wound she had waited quietly for us, and had died game!