ste for
my rifle, which I had not brought with me, never expecting to require it
until a regular campaign could be arranged. As soon as it arrived, we
formed in line and advanced, throwing stones in all directions.

Make no offering of admiration at the shrine of our hardihood, for we
were in no peril. Among carnivorous beasts there is not a more
contemptible poltroon than the hyaena, even when wounded. A friend of
mine once tied up a billy goat as a bait for a panther and sat up over
it in a tree. In the middle of the night a hyaena nosed it from afar,
and came sneaking up in the rear, for hyaenas love the flesh of goats
next to that of dogs. But the goat saw it, and, turning about bravely,
presented his horned front. This the hyaena could not find stomach to
face. For two hours he manoeuvred to take the goat in rear, but it
turned as he circled, and stood up to him stoutly till the dawn came,
and my friend cut short its disreputable career with a bullet.

To return to my story, we had not gone far when, on a lower level, not
many yards from me, I was suddenly confronted by that repulsive,
ghoulish physiognomy which can never be forgotten when once seen, the
smoky-black snout, broad forehead and great upstanding ears. Instantly
the beast wheeled and scrambled over a bank, receiving a hasty rear
shot which, as I afterwards found, left it but one limb to go with, for
the bullet passed clean through a hindleg and lodged in a foreleg. It
went on, however, and some time passed before I descried it far off
dragging itself painfully across an open space. A careful shot finished
it, and it died under a thick bush, where we found it and dragged it
out. It proved to be a large male, measuring 4 feet 7 inches, from which
something over a foot must be deducted for its shabby tail.

The natives all maintained still that their cow had been killed by a
panther, saying that the hyaena had come on the second night, after
their manner, to fill its base belly with the leavings. And there was
some circumstantial evidence in favour of this view. In the first place,
I never heard of a hyaena having the audacity to attack a cow; in the
second, the tooth-marks on the cow showed that it had been executed
according to the tradition of all the great cats--by seizing its throat
and breaking its neck; and in the third, a hyaena, sitting down to such
a meal, would certainly have begun with calf's head and crunched up
every bone of the skull befor