FOUR

Go to Sleep When They Roar

Yet the warrior tribes thought nothing of spearing him, and some who would face a lion alone would not face a buffalo. A lion will run from you like a dog if you shout at him and there is no hunger or bitterness in him. It is when he is old and cunning, and too slow to pull down a zebra or a buck, and the hair on his mane has grown grey, it is then that he may be dangerous and will take the fight to you without invitation. For when he is old he must find his meat with the minimum of effort, where a native has been thrown into the bush after death, or where a fool sleeps without a fire.

But he is magnificent in movement, and it is this magnificence that leads people to call him King, a title which rightly belongs to the elephant. The sun ripples on his flanks as he pads through the grass, velvet upper lip lifted in a snarl, his back as flat as a table. Then he is majestic, it is true, with a regal contempt for you unless you offend him. I came upon three one day, and all I had with me was a skinning knife. I stood there with them in front of me, and I called for my rifle and hoped that someone had heard me, which someone had not. But these lions watched me curiously and without malice, as a curious dog might, and finally they turned and trotted away. I know they are cats, but always they reminded me of dogs.

Lions work together. They kill as if they had a strategist among them. A lioness will drop in the grass and lie there without moving, while the males go out in a wide silent sweep, driving the placid zebra toward her until she can bring one down, and when she brings one down the others turn and run back upon the beating males to die.

Once I shot a lioness and wounded her, I broke a leg I think, and dusk came too soon for me to track her by the blood-spoor and kill her. She lay out there in the brush and I heard her and the others roaring, and this was a comfort, for when lions roar at night you may go to sleep. It is when they are quiet and you know they are there, it is then that you may worry.

I went out in the morning and followed the blood and I found a strange thing. I found where she had lain all night, and all around her the grass had been beaten down by the circle of guarding males. She had arisen with them at dawn and gone off with them, and I followed the trail of a dozen lions to the river where they had taken her.

There they had left her, knowing she was dying and could not follow. She was lying by the water when I found her, and when she heard me her head came up bravely. There was blood on her flanks, and on the dragging trail she had made down to the water, but her head came up in that challenge and I saw the claws unsheathing from her pads. I shot her cleanly and the bullet killed her, which was the best I could do in my admiration.

A lion never came close enough to claw me, and in this I was just lucky, for you can never say for sure what you would do. Geoffrey Buxton would not have believed that he would do what he did. He was out one morning with a Somali shikari, on the Theika south of Mount Kenya, and he was lucky to have a Somali with him, for these are loyal and brave men. Buxton was carrying a double-barrelled -577 and its stock, where it had been trampled on by an elephant, was bound with tape. His shikari carried a Mauser, and I mention these weapons because they are relevant.

They had been away from their camp for thirty minutes when they raised a handsome black-mane, and it loped away from them leisurely, having no quarrel with them. Buxton ran after it, and winded himself as he stumbled, and his breathing was hard, his eyes misted, so that his first shot was a fluke in its success. He hit the lion inside the front shoulder from fifty yards, as it turned to warn him with a roar. The bullet passed through the lion from end to end and dropped it. Buxton should have left it there and it would have been dead within a quarter of an hour, but he was not sure how badly it had been hit and he was afraid to lose it.

He came up and fired again, and this time there was no fluke and he missed. The lion rose up and charged. With a channel ranging the length of its body where the bullet had gone, the lion still had the strength to charge. Buxton put a spare shell into the chamber of his gun and as he did so he saw that the last two shots had loosened the stock, so he fired from the hip as the lion leaped, and he missed.

As they came together Buxton thrust with the gun as a man might with a spear, forcing the barrel down the throat of the lion, and the animal took it in its jaws as it might a branch. Two claws went into Buxton's forearm, six inches above the hand that held the gun. They went in and through to the other side. With his free hand Buxton held the lion's mane, with his other he forced the gun further into the lion's throat.

They fell over, and the lion clawed with its hind-paws as a cat does with a ball, and it slit open Buxton's thighs and calves, and only the gun in the lion's throat kept its jaws from him.

The Somali tried to fire the Mauser, but the safety-catch was on, and this he did not know, or did not know enough to release it. He dropped the gun and climbed on the lion's back, hitting it with his fists, gouging at its eyes, until the three of them rolled over and the lion tore its claws from Buxton's arm. He crawled away, and he picked up the Mauser and emptied it into the lion's skull.

This was a lion, already dying, and it fought like that.

To such men as Buxton the lion was a challenge, the killing of it the fulfilment of some instinctive and savage urge. So it was too, I imagine, with Lucas, who shared a farm along the Athi with his partner Gibbons. They jumped a lion while riding along the tall river-grass one morning, and raced after it. The lion went into the grass with a sudden swerve and as Gibbons' pony went by it sprang. It put its right fore-paw into the pony, its left into Gibbons' thigh. It held itself there and clawed at the pony's rump with its hind-claws. Gibbons could not get his gun to bear on the lion, and all three went down.

Lucas was afraid to shoot from the saddle, so he jumped off and ran forward, and then the lion turned on him in a spring and took him down. Gibbons crawled from beneath the kicking pony and killed the lion.

They got Lucas to Nairobi hospital and the doctors looked at him and said they would have been far happier had they seen him earlier, for the poison from the lion's claws had taken hold of Lucas' legs, and if he wished to live it would have to be without those legs. Lucas thought about this, and what it would be like in Africa for him without his legs, and he decided calmly that he would die instead. He lay in the hospital for two more days while the poison went up slowly from his thighs to his body, and he asked the doctors if there would be another day for him, and they said there would not. So he called for his friends, and they came in and sat with him drinking whisky and soda, and they toasted him a happy death and he toasted them a long life, and so he died.

There was the lion, too, that took a man from a carriage on the old narrow-gauge Uganda Railway. This man was Ryall, the Superintendent of the Railway Police. He and two friends had come up from Mombasa to kill a man-eater that had killed many workmen on the line between Kiu and Sultan Hamud.

The carriage was left on the siding during the night, and Ryall was in a compartment with an Italian called Parenti, who told the story afterwards, but never easily because he would weep when he told it. He said he awoke during the night and found himself on the floor with something heavy and foul-smelling treading on him. He heard the crunch of its jaws and a cry, a very short and sad cry from Ryall, and then the lion was gone through the loose slats of the window.

There were many man-eaters along that railway, and they would come in groups, which is rare among man-eaters. At one time they had a station under siege, and twenty of them were shot from the doors and from the windows, and from the top of the water-tank. The Hindu station-master sent for help, and ten askaris were sent up to guard the station, but two days later the Hindu's unhappy report came down the wire to Mombasa: At time of roaring policemen are not so brave. Please arrange quick.

I did my most satisfying killing of lions when I was hunting along the Anglo-German border. I was looking for buffalo. You look for one thing, you shoot another.

I knew that country and it was a country I loved. I felt that I owned it, a beautiful stretch from Victoria Nyanza to Kilimanjaro, and I made it my own particular hunting-ground. Sometimes it rolled in gentle waves of short-grassed meadows, with tall, lone trees standing sentinel over bush-filled dongas. Then there would be elephant grass twice my height, splashed with shrubs whose lilac-tinted flowers were as breathlessly pure as rhododendron blossoms. There were marshes with swaying cat's tails, and great dry gullies of mud that the elephant had trampled into incredible formations. There were glades in the grass where the buffalo had made their dormitories, and tunnels padded out by rhino.

I traded ivory and rhino horn for cattle across the German border, and I sold the cattle to European settlers. I had three or four Arab agents buying cattle for me in German East and I was happy. I was good in my happiness, too. I persuaded the Masai and the Lumbwa to agree to an uneasy peace. Until then they had been raiding each other's villages, stealing young girls and putting old women to the sword, and perhaps they had grown tired of it all, for the Masai sealed the armistice with a promise of forty fat sheep for every heifer I brought to their munyatas.

I went from there to the Lumbwa highlands and although this was where I did my most satisfying lion-killing the story I want to tell you has nothing to do with lions, but it was there along the Maggori River that this thing happened.

I found the river in flood, and I pitched camp and wandered up-stream looking for a big tree we could drop across to make a bridge. I found another place where the pack-donkeys could swim across, and, content with myself, I sat down and filled a pipe.

I had an hour making dreams out of pipe-smoke when Masoni, my Lumbwa gun-bearer, came up shaking. He said that he and the other boys had gone up to fell the tree and found a strange animal sleeping on the bank. They described it and I did not believe them. From what they said it was something between a snake and a crocodile and a leopard, which was an interesting mutation, but hardly convincing.

I sent them back up the river to see if it were still there, and they were to send a runner back to me if they found it again. Half an hour later Masoni came back to say the animal was still there, but now it was fully-exposed on the water in mid-stream. I picked up a •303 and went back with him. I found my boys hanging from the trees, jabbing their fingers down to the river and shaking their heads. I slid down the bank and got in the cover of the bushes. There it was.

It was in mid-stream, about thirty feet from me, a beast-fish, a creature from your nightmares. It was fifteen to eighteen feet in length, with a massive head, not a head like a crocodile's, but fiat-skulled and round. It had two yellow fangs dropping from its upper jaw, and its back was as broad as a hippo's, but it was scaled in beautifully overlapping plates, as smooth and as intricate as those I've seen on an old Arabian cuirass. The sunlight fell on those wet scales and was dappled by the leaves, and made them seem as brilliantly coloured as a leopard's coat. It had something of every animal in it. It was impossible.

There was a broad tail, and this was swinging gently against the current, keeping it mid-stream, keeping it stationary, whatever it was.

At last I took aim on it. Where to hit an animal you had never seen before? For all I knew it was armoured like a rhino. I aimed the -303 at the base of the neck and gave it one solid round.

I saw the bullet hit, and heard it hit the way you do at short range. The beast turned in a great flurry of yellow water until it was facing the bank and my cover. It leaped into the air until it was standing, or so it seemed, its belly scales livid, ten or twelve feet on end.

I ran. My Lumbwa boys were already crashing away through the forest with me stumbling after them. We ran three hundred yards before we halted, badly blown, looking at each other. I regained my nerve at last and bullied the boys back to the river. It had gone, but its spoor was all over the soft mud, huge prints about the size of a hippo's but clawed.

Some Wanderobo told me that they knew about this thing;, they called it a dingonek. The Kavirondo knew of it too. They had seen more than one of them and made a god out of it whom they called 'Luquata'. They were worried when they heard that a white man had shot at Luquata. They said that now they would all die of sleeping sickness, and it is true that there was an epidemic

of it among the Kavirondo that year.

* * *

The current was too strong for us to build a bridge across the Maggori and we were forced to camp where we were, and live on meat and honey as our supplies ran out. The lions became a nuisance. They were thick along the river and we found fresh spoor in the mud every morning.

Ammunition was running short, too, and I restricted myself to five cartridges only when I went out to shoot meat. I argued that if I carried more I would waste them, and if I couldn't get a buck in five shots I might as well not try.

Usually I was lucky, like the day I got two topi hartebeeste with two shots. I left the porters to skin the animals. My leg was bad with the old bullet-wound and with eczema and I got on my donkey to go back to camp. A boy called Martinit was my gun-bearer.

About five o'clock we struck a bad patch of bush and fifty yards or so from it I got the strong, acrid scent of lion. It is a warm scent and unpleasant to the taste. I got off the donkey and gave the reins to Martinit, took my gun from him, and we circled the bush. We had made a half-circuit when we saw the lioness, back on her haunches, her body quivering in those little backward-forward movements as she judged the length of her spring.

She had scented the donkey, not us, but when she saw us she straightened up and sneered, and you could see her making up her mind whether to spring or to leave us. And I was thinking about my cartridges. Five of them, two gone on the hartebeeste, and I did not know whether there was one in the breech of the gun or not. In such cases there is only one sensible thing to do. I pulled back the bolt, and with its action the round came back and was spun out by the ejector. It went over into the long grass, and with the lioness still making up her mind, and likely to make it up any second, there was no time for me to go searching for the lost shell. I rammed the bolt home and put one of the two remaining rounds into the breech.

The slide and the snap of the bolt decided the lioness. She turned and loped for the bush, and I should have let her go, but there was the chance of a glancing shot, and like a fool I took it.

The bullet struck her on the shoulder and she turned to charge me.

I pushed the last round into the breech and knelt for another shot, at the same time feeling in the grass for the ejected round.

She bounded toward me, but you cannot be sure with lions. A buffalo would have gone straight into that charge and nothing would have stopped it, but that lioness halted suddenly and roared. Then she turned with a whisk of her tail and ran for the bush. Recklessly I gave her the last bullet in the rump as she hit the scrub.

I began to search for the lost round, shouting for Martinit, wherever he was, to come and help me.

'Here, Bwana!' He was in a tree and shaking it with his fear.

'Get down out of there!'

He came down slowly, and I do not blame him. There was a twice-wounded lioness in the bush and I had an empty gun.

'Where the hell is the donkey?'

'Donkey gone, Bwana.' He seemed to think that the donkey had had the right idea from the beginning.

I boxed his ears. It had no effect on him. I boxed them again, and he stood gaping over my shoulder at the bush. So interesting did he find that bush that I turned myself, and there was a handsome lion watching us curiously, tail swinging. Then, and I swear to this, the bushes moved all round us until there was a pride of eighteen standing there.

They became less interested in us than annoyed with each other, and began to snarl and paw. I took Martinit's arm and we soft-footed away from there until we could run to the camp.

The lions came up to the firelight that night and I kept two boys awake all night throwing brushwood on the fire, and at times I awoke and saw them in their blankets, the flames ruddy on their skins and their spear-blades. I got up in the morning with the thought of that wounded lioness and I knew that I must find her and kill her. I took Martinit and half a dozen of the elmorani back to where I had shot her. We followed her blood spoor to a stream where she had drunk and across to the other side into the brush. I don't like following wounded lion into thick bush, and I have never heard of anyone who did. Everything is against you, and the only justification you have is that what you wound you must eventually kill, and there is a bitter irony in the fact that once you have wounded it your animal goes to the one place where the odds are in its favour. It goes where you cannot see it but where it can see you, and it waits to kill you. Your rifle sweats in your hand, the flies stick to the back of your neck, and you are afraid. You can tell by the footfall of your boys that they are afraid too. The monkeys chatter at you and tease your nerves, the birds come up suddenly from the ground, and your arm gets tired of swinging the rifle to your shoulder, and you think, if you are fool enough to think at all, of the men you know who were killed doing what you are doing.

My Lumbwa were ahead and behind me, shields before them to take the weight of the lioness if she charged, long-bladed spears poised in the right hand. They were beautiful. They moved slowly, and with every step their heads swung from side to side, and sometimes they would stop altogether, and when one stopped we all stopped.

The brush broke into tall, coarse grass, the tops of it dipping over and shuddering in the slight wind. Had I been alone I would have circled the grass and tried to pick up the spoor on the other side, although I knew that if the lioness had gone to ground this would be where she would hide. My elmorani expected me to go in, however, and I signalled them to follow me.

I went in ten yards, with the grass closing behind me, and then I fell into a masked gully. As I fell I dropped the rifle. The grass cut my palms as I snatched at it, but this I only discovered later; what I felt then was the scent of lion, strong, rank, as if her body were beside me. I got on my knees and was knocked flat again as Masoni fell on me. Now he was no longer a lion-killer but a frightened man whose spear and shield had gone the way my rifle had gone, and he smelt lion too, and he yelled, a high yip of surprise and fear that brought the other Lumbwa to the edge of the gully, chattering as they smelt lion too.

They leaped in and beat down the grass with their shields, yelling at the lioness, and when they had gone the length of the gully they found her. She was dead, and the maggots were already in her.

But we were not finished with lions on that hunt. About three o'clock that afternoon I was stretched out under the fly of my tent, watching the heat shuddering on the horizon, when the boy who was supposed to be herding the cattle came in to say that he had lost them. He said it with a great deal of shame and many apologies. I sent some of the Lumbwa to search for the cattle, and told them that while they were looking they might f the donkey that Martinit had lost.

I was having tea, and cursing the pain in my which had not been improved by the fall into the don when Masoni padded into camp in that lazy fc flapping run of the Lumbwa. Bwana had best come w the rifle. The cattle trail had been found, and writ all over it was the fresh spoor of lion.

I went out and came up with the elmorani where t were squatting by the trail. From the running of spoor it was plain that the cattle had been in flight v the lions after them. I took the herder by the ear ; tugged the truth out of him. He had been asleep w the lions came up, and their coughing had awoken 1 and he had run. My lion-killing Lumbwa sneerec him.

I sent back for another rifle and all the warriors t could be spared, and we set off on the spoor. By dusk were more than six miles from camp, on broken, ci ground. So we lit a fire and sat about it, the elmo with their shields leaning against their shoulders, t spears held in their right hands, and their clacl tongues working out the logic of the missing herd. T said that in truth the cattle were making for their < country, led by an old cow. They said the cattle w< follow this old cow anywhere. They were very prou her sagacity. I could have shot her.

I nearly did. By nine o'clock lions were roaring f half a dozen points beyond the rim of firelight, and elmorani drew in closer and threw more brush on fire, and talked a little less of the wise old cow. roaring went on until we heard something pluni toward us.

*

We jumped up and I swung round, aiming at noise. It came out of the darkness suddenly. It c into the light and paused long enough for us to see it was the cow. Then she passed through us and when she saw that she was going back into the darkness she turned and came back. The Lumbwa formed a line, and when she reached them a second time one of the elmorani grabbed her humped neck. He was a brave man, for it does not do to grab a frightened cow in the half-light, particularly a cow that has been frightened by lions. She fought him, bucking, tossing, and he swung from her neck while his friends danced around them both, soothing her with cries and encouraging him with shouts, until at last she was still, and they staked her near the fire.

All night we heard the rest of the herd crashing in the bush as the lions roared, and we did not sleep, waiting for them to come in and over us. At dawn we began to search for them.

We found ten heifers, and one of them was bleeding on the rump where a lion had misjudged its spring. By ten o'clock we had found all except two heifers and a bull, and when we saw vultures dropping from the sky a mile away we knew what had happened to these three missing persons.

When we got back to camp a Lumbwa came out to meet us. He was bleeding from the shoulders and arms, but on his face was that smirk you see on the faces of men who are well satisfied with themselves. He had seen those vultures too, and lest we got all the glory he had gone out and found a young lion feeding on the donkey (so that's what happened to the donkey). He stood up and stamped his foot and called 'Ha/' But the lion, who put first things first, went on eating. So the elmoran drew back his spear-arm and shot the blade. It slashed the flank of the lion which, still putting first things first, now went into a charge.

The Lumbwa took it on his hide shield, going back and over, with his sword stabbing, and the lion's claws at his shoulders, until the lion was dead with the soft iron inside him, and the elmoran had done no more than

his people would expect of a warrior.

* * *

The main difference between a lion and a leopard is that the leopard can climb a tree. I know there are other differences, but he can climb a tree, which means that there is nowhere you can escape from him. He is the most dangerous of the cats, and therefore there is more credit in facing him and killing him, if it is credit you want.

He is a snake on four legs, and a very beautiful snake, He is cunning. He knows where to strike a man. A lion claws and bites like a bully, but a leopard springs for the head of man, which shows his wisdom. He is valiant yet he lives on dogs, and having taken one from a village will come again and again until there are no more dogs. He lives on pigs and sheep and goats, this leopard, for he has a taste for sweet meat. He kills baboons and small monkeys. He is valiant yet he wants as little trouble from his kill as possible. Having killed he is a fastidious and methodical diner. He drinks the blood, eats the tender parts, and hides the remainder in the fork of a tree for future pleasure.

Leopards will hunt in pairs, but more often stalk alone. There is no group noun for leopards, no 'pride' of them, but if there were one you might make it a slink of leopards. So beautiful are they in movement, so rhythmically composed that they seem boneless. They are not like lions who lie at their kill indifferent to sycophantic dogs and hyenas. The leopard has no audience when he eats, for he is inclined to turn onlookers into the next course. He'll mix with no other animals except sometimes his cousin the cheetah, and he passes through the forest very much a thing to himself.

When he is wounded or he is hungry he is superbly indifferent to danger or death. There was a particularly cunning leopard up by Kericho during the time of the famine. The bodies of the dead, the babies left abandoned made him fat and eager for human flesh. I heard of him when someone told me that a leopard had attacked two Lumbwa women who were now in hospital, or what passed for a hospital there. I went up and talked with them.

They told me that a party of kokos, old women of the village, had been carrying loads to Fort Ternan on the Uganda Railway. In the heat of the day they had put down their loads and lain under the trees to rest, and while they lay there this man-eater had padded silently out of the trees and bitten a piece from one of the women, like taking a bite from an apple.

She screamed, and the others woke up and screamed, and the leopard backed and pawed and snarled, rose up and bit another woman in the face before retiring. Some men came up with their spears jumping, and they went into the trees and surrounded the leopard which would not be drawn out. So they formed themselves into a line, stamped their feet, clashed their shields and shouted their battle-cry. They went forward with shields braced.

The leopard sprang and landed belly down on the shield wall. It clawed the scalp from one warrior but the others crowded round and stabbed it until it was dead.

Such stories I had heard often enough before, but I thought of the leopard, and of how many more the famine must have brought to the district, and at this time my curiosity was distinctly purposeful for I had not yet shot a leopard.

A few nights later I was walking from the Post Office to the store with four of my Lumbwa, when a leopard loped across the street before us. I heard one of the elmorani hiss, saw the movement as his arm went back, and heard the spear go forward. It stopped her from springing. It held her in the flank, but she rolled into a black and yellow ball, spitting, taking the spear between her teeth, bending it and pulling it free. Then she ran toward the river. We followed her but it was too dark.

Next morning I went after her with a shot-gun, and like a fool I went alone. I found her at the water, crouched behind some rocks, and she was only six yards away when I saw her. I pulled up my gun, and I could not remember whether the only charge it held was in the right chamber or the left. The first trigger clicked. I squeezed the second just in time, for she was already in the air, floating toward me, ears back, paws at my head.

The shot struck her in the face and stopped the force of her charge. She rolled, biting the grass, her eyes gone. But she was a brave leopard. There was still the mark of the spear on her flank. She was blind. She was bleeding black on her muzzle, but she fought for life. I felt sick as I watched her. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her, not because I hated her but because I was now sorry for her.

I picked up a branch and struck her on the head, but she did not die, she clawed out at me in her darkness. I threw my skinning knife at her, and the blade stuck in her with no more effect than a thorn. I saw one of my boys standing behind a tree, his eyes wide, and I shouted for him to go back for some cartridges.

She got to her feet when I called, her bloody and blinded head swinging as she tried to smell me out, but the scent of her own blood was too strong on her, and she slipped down to the river and splashed water over her head to rid herself of the blood. And while she stood there, the muddy water going carmine, my boy came back and I killed her.

* * *

I was trekking up to Fort Ternan from Kericho, and I left too late. By dusk I had reached a farm about four miles from the station. I pitched tent near a cattle kraal and went off to see the settler who owned it. He gave me a whisky morosely. He said the Nandi were in bad blood, raiding cattle, and he wouldn't be surprised to have a call from them this night, or any night. I thanked him for the whisky and the news and went back and asked my Lumbwa if they knew this about the Nandi. They did not know, but they were ready to believe anything about the Nandi.

I was sitting outside my tent after dinner when I heard a shout and a shot from the other side of the kraal, and I picked up a revolver and ran over. Torches were flaming over the boma and I found the settler staring over the thorn-hedge with a gun in his hand. He said his cattle-guard had heard something trying to break through and called him. We waited and heard nothing more, and I went back, thinking the cattle-guard should know the difference between a hyena and a Nandi elmoran.

I sat by my tent to finish my pipe and as I sat there my terrier began to whine. I called to him, and there was a yellow flash, one yelp from the dog and silence. I fired. I rushed out firing until the Webley was empty, hoping that the noise at least would make the leopard release the dog. I liked that terrier. I like all dogs, but that terrier I loved.

I ran after them and I fell into a stream. I sat on the grass and I cried. I hated that leopard.

In the morning I went down to the stream with two boys. From the spoor it was either a lioness or a big leopard. The track went on into open country where the earth was black and ashy from a grass-fire, and the powder of it stung the nostrils. The trail went over the ash to the lip of a ravine, and I went down on my belly and crawled forward. There, about five yards below me, was six feet of handsome leopard, asleep under a tree.

I shot it with pleasure. The bullet hit with a thwunk, the way you can hear a bullet hit at such close range. The leopard reared up out of its sleep and clawed at the

tree. I fired again, but this was bad shooting for I angry and hateful. The second bullet smashed t leopard's spine but did not kill it. It fell back into t grass behind the tree and we heard it spitting a screaming. It was in agony, but it had killed my terri and I did not feel about it the way I had felt about tl leopard I blinded with gunshot.

We went down into the ravine at last. The leopa: could not stand, but it was going to fight us. It draggcl itself forward, hind-quarters sprawled, smearing il blood on the grass. I went up to it and it spat at me as I shot it through the head.

I did not look at it again. I heard my boys laughing J they skinned it, deciding who was going to ask the Bwarl for the claws.

I sat down under a tree and filled my pipe, and I toll myself that at least I had done something for the terriej which was a sentimental thought but none the le: I sincere. Something hit my hand lightly. It was wet an it was red and it was blood. I looked up into the tre and saw what was left of my dog, held in a fork.

I got it down and I buried it carefully in an ant hole I put a cairn of stones over the hole to keep the hyena away.