Part 15

The Capturing of a Lion

Simba Station--Lion Station--is the name of a place on the Uganda Railway, which connects the Indian Ocean with the Victoria-Nyanza. It is situated near Nairobi, and the sound of its name recalls vividly to my memory January 25, 1897, the great day when I came face to face with three lions.

At that time no iron road led to the interior of the country; there were neither railway lines nor telegraph wires to vibrate to the sound of the voice of the monarch of the wilderness. But the white man was soon to bar his path by day and night along the whole length of the great railroad from lake to ocean.

C. G. Schillings, phot.

IN A BETTER TEMPER.]

“Lion Station” deserves its name, for in the vicinity of this spot over a hundred Indian workmen have been seized by lions. To me this was no surprise, for years before I had visited the region, and had done full justice to its wilderness in my description of it. Some stir was caused when a lion killed a European in one of the sleeping-cars at night-time. In company with two others, the unfortunate man was passing the night in a saloon carriage which had been shunted on to a siding. One of the Europeans slept on the floor; as a precaution against mosquitoes he had covered himself with a cloth. Another was lying on a raised bunk. The lion seized the third man, who was sleeping near the two others on a camp-bed, killed him, and carried him away. One of the survivors, Herr Hübner--whose hunting-box, “Kibwezi,” in British East Africa, has given many sportsmen an opportunity of becoming acquainted with African game--gave me the following account of the incident: “The situation was a critical one. The door through which the beast had entered the compartment was rolled back. I saw the creature at about an arm’s length from me, standing with its fore-paws on the bed of my sleeping friend. Then a sudden snatch, followed by a sharp cry, told me that all was over. The lion’s right paw had fallen on my friend’s left temple, and its teeth were buried deep in his left breast near the armpit. For the next two minutes a deathly stillness reigned. Then the lion pulled the body from off the bed and laid it on the ground.” The lion disappeared with the corpse into the darkness of the night. It was killed shortly after, as might be expected.

Such scenes were probably more frequent in earlier days, when, in the Orange Free State, a single hunter would kill five-and-twenty lions. This was so even down to the year 1863, when impallah antelopes (Æpyceros suara) had already become very rare in Bechuanaland, and in Natal a keen control had to be instituted over the use of arms. Times have changed. In the year 1899 much sensation was aroused by the fact that a lion was killed near Johannesburg, and so far back as 1883 there was quite a to-do over a lion that was seen and killed at Uppington, on the Orange River. To Oswald and Vardon, well-known English hunters, as well as to Moffat in Bechuanaland, the encountering of as many as nine troops of lions in a day was quite an ordinary experience, and I still found lions in surprising numbers in 1896 in German and British East Africa. The practical records of the Anglo-German Boundary Commission in East Africa, the observations made lately by Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, and the evidence of many other trustworthy witnesses, have confirmed these facts.

Although I do not think that lions, at least in districts where game is very plentiful, are so dangerous as some would make out, yet I quite agree with the statement made by H. A. Bryden that a lion-hunt made on foot must be reckoned as one of the most dangerous sports there are. The experience of an authority like Selous, who was seized by lions during the night in the jungle, proves this.

In the region in which I had such success lion-hunting in 1897, there were many mishaps. My friend the commandant of Port Smith in Kiku uland, who was badly mauled by lions, has since had more than one fellow-sufferer in this respect.

Captain Chauncy Hugh-Stegand, who, like Mr. Hall and so many other hunters of other nationalities, had been several times injured by rhinoceroses, was once within an ace of being killed by a lion which he encountered by night, and which he shot at and pursued. Severely wounded, and cured almost by a miracle, he had to return to England to regain his health. “Such are the casualties of sportsmen in Central and East Africa” is the dry comment of Sir Harry Johnston in his preface to the English edition of my book With Flashlight and Rifle.

When I read about such adventures I call to mind vividly my own. I live through them all again, and the magic of these experiences reawakes in me.

To-day I would fain give the reader some account of the capturing of lions. Not of captures made by means of a net, such as skilful and brave men used in olden days to throw over the king of beasts, thus disabling him and putting him in their power, but of a capture that was not without its many intense and exciting moments.

Proud Rome saw as many as five hundred lions die in the arena in one day. That was in the time of Pompey. Nearly two thousand years have passed since then, and one may safely affirm that in the intervening centuries very few lions have been brought to Europe that were caught when full grown in the desert. The many lions that are brought over to our continent are caught when young, and then reared, despite the credence given sometimes to statements to the contrary.

It goes without saying that lions which have matured in confinement cannot compare with the lions that have come to their full development in the wilderness. Full-grown tigers and leopards are still nowadays in some cases ensnared alive, and we can see them in our zoological gardens in all their native wildness, and without any artificial breeding, marked with the unmistakable stamp common to all wild animals. It is an established fact that all captive monkeys show symptoms after a certain time of rachitis. This is also the case frequently with large felines. Lions brought up in captivity, however, have far finer manes than wild ones.

Of course a certain number of the lions used in the arena-fights in Rome were probably reared in the Roman provinces by some potentate. But without doubt a large number were caught when fully grown by means of nets, pitfalls, and other devices of which we have no precise details.

It seemed to me worth while to make a trial of the means which had once been so successful. As I have already pointed out, there is a great difference between a man who scours the wilderness solely as a hunter, and one who makes practical investigations into the life of the animal world. The sportsman may possibly sneer at the use of pitfalls. He has no mind for anything but an exciting encounter with the lion, an encounter which, thanks to modern means of warfare, is much easier for the man than formerly.

ANOTHER OF MY HUNTING CARDS. THE RECORD OF MY LION-HUNT OF THE 25TH JANUARY, 1897, ON THE ATHI PLAINS, WHEN I KILLED TWO LIONS AND A LIONESS (“LÖWE”=LION; LÖWIN=LIONESS).]

However, I have no wish whatever to lay down the law on this question of the relative amount of danger involved in the shooting or the trapping of lions. In many parts of Africa lion-hunting is a matter of luck, above all where horses cannot live owing to the tsetse-fly, and where dogs cannot be employed in large numbers (as used to be the practice in South Africa) to mark down the lions until the hunter can come. For example, we have it on good authority that the members of an Anglo-Abyssinian Border Commission, aided by a pack of dogs, were able to kill about twenty lions in the course of a year. But on entering the region of Lake Rudolf all the dogs fall victims to the tsetse-fly. Hunting with a pack of dogs is very successful. Dogs were used by the three brothers Chudiakow, who, some nine years ago, near Nikolsk on the Amur, in Manchuria, killed nearly forty Siberian tigers in one winter; whilst a hunting party near Vladivostock killed in one month one hundred and twenty-five wild boars and seven tigers. Tigers are so plentiful near Mount Ararat that a military guard of three men is necessary during the night-watch to ward off these beasts of prey.

My extraordinary luck on January 25, 1897, when I killed three full-grown lions, fine big specimens, was of course a source of much satisfaction to me. The little sketch-map of the day’s hunt which accompanies this chapter shows the route I took on that memorable occasion, and gives a good idea of the way in which I am accustomed to keep a record of such things in my diary. I must add that my adventures and narrow escapes while trying to secure lions have been of a kind such as would be to the taste only of those most greedy of excitement.

In 1897 I had already observed that the lion was to be found in great troops in thinly populated neighbourhoods, where he was at no loss for prey and where he had not much to fear from man. As many as thirty lions have been found together, and I myself have seen a troop of fourteen with my own eyes. Other sportsmen have seen still larger troops in East Africa. Quite recently Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, who, on the occasion of his second African trip, made some interesting observations in regard to lions, has borne witness to the existence of very large troops. During the period in which I devoted myself entirely to making photographic studies of wild life, and consequently left undisturbed all the different species of game which swarmed around my camp, I was sometimes surrounded for days, weeks even, by great numbers of them, sometimes to an alarming extent. I have already described how one night an old lion brushed close by my tent to drink at the brook near which we were encamping, although it was just as easy for him to drink from the same stream at any point for miles to either side of us. On another occasion, as could be seen from the tracks, lions approached our camp until within a few yards of it. When I was photographing the lions falling upon the heifers and donkeys, as described in With Flashlight and Rifle, I must have been, judging by the tracks, surrounded by about thirty. I trapped a number of them, either for our various museums, where specimens in various stages of development and age are much needed, or to protect the natives who were menaced by lions, or whose relatives had perhaps been seized by them.

It is the more necessary to have recourse to traps in that one may spend years hunting in Equatorial East Africa without getting a single chance of firing a shot at a lion. The hunt has to take place at night, for the lion leads a nocturnal life, and makes off into inaccessible thickets by day.

But what I was most anxious to do was to secure a specimen or two that I could bring alive to Europe. To do this, I required the lightest possible and most portable iron cages, which should yet be strong enough to resist every effort of the imprisoned animals to get free. This problem was solved for me as well as it could be by Professor Heck, the Director of the Berlin Zoological Gardens. Yet even he declared it to be impossible to make such cages under 330 lbs. in weight. For the transport of one such cage the services of six bearers would be necessary. I arranged for several such cages to be sent oversea to Tanga, and took them thence into the interior. Thus I had the assurance of keeping my captives in security, but first I had to get hold of them without hurting them. By means of a modified form of iron traps I was able to manage this eventually. Those who are not acquainted with the difficulties of transport in countries where everything has to be borne on men’s shoulders will hardly be able to realise the straits to which one may be put. Thus I was much hampered, when carrying back my first lion (which was unharmed save for a few skin scratches), by a lack of bearers owing to famine and other causes.

I had found the tracks of a lioness with three quite little cubs. I followed them for an hour over the velt--they then got lost in the thick bush. As I had already observed the tracks of this little band for several days, I naturally concluded that the old lioness was making a stay in the neighbourhood. So I decided, as one of my heifers was ill from the tsetse sickness and bound to die, to pitch my tent in the neighbourhood and to bait a trap with the sick animal.

I found water at about an hour and a half’s distance from the spot where I had observed the lion’s tracks. I was thus obliged to encamp at this distance away. Later on in the evening, after much labour, I succeeded in setting a trap in such a way that I had every reason to hope for good results.

In the early hours of the following morning I started out, full of hope, to visit my trap. Already in the distance I could see that my heifer was still alive, and I immediately concluded that the lions had sought the open. But it was not so, for to my surprise I presently found fresh tracks of the old lioness and her cubs. Evidently she had visited the trap, but had returned into the bush without taking any notice of the easy prey. The lie of the land allowed me to read the lion’s tracks imprinted into the ground as if in a book. They told me that the cubs had at one point suddenly darted to one side, their curiosity excited by a land-tortoise whose back was now reflecting the rays of the sun, and which in the moonlight must have attracted their attention. They had evidently amused themselves for a while with this plaything, for the hard surface of the tortoise’s shell was marked with their claws. Then they had returned to their mother. I concluded that the old lioness was not hungry and had no more lust for prey--another confirmation of the fact that lions, when sated, are not destructive. This new proof seemed to me to be worth all the trouble I had taken.

The two following nights, to my disappointment, the lions approached my heifer again without molesting it.

This was the more annoying because I had hoped by capturing the old lioness to obtain possession of all the young cubs as well.

In this case, as in many others, the behaviour of the heifer was a matter of great interest. As already remarked, in most cases I made use of sick cows mortally afflicted by the tsetse-fly. In many districts in German East Africa the tsetse-fly, which causes the dreadful sleeping sickness in man, also makes it impossible to keep cattle except under quite special conditions. This heifer, then, was already doomed to a painful death through the tsetse illness, and the fate I provided for it was more merciful, for the lion kills its prey by one single powerful bite. I observed, moreover, that the bound animal took its food quite placidly and showed no signs of unrest so long as the lion came up to her peaceably, as in this case. This accorded entirely with my frequent observations of the behaviour of animals towards lions on the open velt. Antelopes out on the velt apparently take very little notice of lions, though they hold themselves at a respectful distance from them.