Fate seemed determined to give us plenty of chances to get these lions. Again we opened fire on them at about four or five hundred yards. My big-gun ammunition was gone, so I fired with my .256.
No result! The distance was too great and our bombardment was fruitless. The black-maned lion was in a bad humor and repeatedly turned as if intent to stop and defend his outraged dignity. In a few moments the three lions disappeared in the tall grass that fringed a big reed bed many acres in extent.
For an hour we raked the reed bed with shot, hoping to drive them from cover. But that was the last we saw of the lions. A little bunch of waterbuck does were scared up, but nothing else. The lions were now safe, for nothing less than fifty beaters could hope to dislodge them from the dense security of the swamp.
It Would Have Been Historic
Talk about dejection! Our ride back to town was as mournful as a ride could be. We thought of the glory of driving through the streets of Nairobi with a lion or two hanging over the back of the carriage. It would have been historic. Citizens would have talked of it for years. It would have taken an honored place in the lion-hunting literature of Africa, for no lion hunters have ever pursued a band of lions in a carriage and brought back a carriage-load of them.
We almost regretted having had the chance that we so heartbreakingly lost.
But we told about it when we struck town, and before the day was over it was the topic in hotels and clubs throughout the whole town of Nairobi. Everybody who had a gun was resolved to go out the next day, and interest was at a fever pitch.
We went out again the following morning, shot at wildebeests at all known ranges, from two hundred yards up to five hundred yards—but our luck was against us. We came back empty-handed, and our chief reward for the morning's work was the great privilege of seeing both Mount Kenia, ninety miles north, and Kilima-Njaro, nearly two hundred miles southeast, as clear as a cameo against the lovely African sky.
The lesson of this story is not so much a review of bad shooting or of bad luck. The thing that seems most noteworthy is that within six or seven miles from Nairobi, nearly all the time within sight of the house-tops of that town, we had seen fifteen varieties of wild game, some of which were present in great numbers.