The lion is soft, and not a
difficult animal to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body. A buck
takes far more killing.
"Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to
make out whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day. About three hundred
yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with single
mimosa-trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond this was
a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole, which
covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds,
now in the sear and yellow leaf. From the farther edge of this pan the
ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut
out by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled with
bush, among which grew some large trees, I forget of what sort.
"It at once struck me that the dry pan would be a likely place to find
my friends in, as there is nothing a lion is fonder of than lying up
in reeds, through which he can see things without being seen himself.
Accordingly thither I went and prospected. Before I had got half-way
round the pan I found the remains of a blue vilder-beeste that had
evidently been killed within the last three or four days and partially
devoured by lions; and from other indications about I was soon assured
that if the family were not in the pan that day they spent a good deal
of their spare time there.
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