. The tail of a rhino is
an infallible barometer of his state of mind. With his short sight, I
knew that he could not see me at that distance, but I knew that he had
detected the direction in which the danger lay. By slowly moving ahead,
the distance was cut to about seventy yards, which was not too far away
in an open country with a wounded rhino in the foreground. I resolved to
shoot before he charged or before he ran away, and so I prepared to end
the long chase with an unerring shot.

Suddenly a sound struck my ear that acted upon me like an electric
shock:

"_Simba!_"

It was the one word that I had been hoping to hear ever since leaving
Nairobi, for the word means "lion." My Somali gunbearer was eagerly
pointing toward a lone tree that stood a hundred yards off to the left.
A huge, hulking animal was slowly moving away from it. It was my first
glimpse of a wild lion. He was half concealed in the tall, dry grass and
in a few seconds had entirely disappeared from view. We rushed after
him. The rhino was completely forgotten and was left to charge or run
away as he saw fit. When we reached the spot where the lion was last
seen there was no trace of him. He apparently was not "as brave as a
lion." We followed the course that he presumably took and presently
reached the crest of a ridge. Then the second gunbearer, a keen-eyed
Kikuyu, discovered the lion three hundred yards off to the right. After
reaching the top of the hill the animal had swung directly off at right
angles with the idea of reaching cover in a dry creek bed some distance
away. I started to shoot at three hundred yards, but before I could take
a careful aim the lion had disappeared in the grass. For an hour we
thrashed the high reeds in the dry creek bed with never a sign of the
king of beasts. He had apparently abdicated. He had vanished so
completely that I thought he had escaped toward some low hills a mile
farther on. The disappointment of seeing a lion and not getting it, or
at least shooting at it, was keen to a degree that actually hurt.

[Drawing: _Game Was Plenty for a Minute or Two_]

There was nothing left but to resume our chase after the wounded rhino.
It was like going back to work after a pleasant two weeks' vacation. We
presently found him on a far distant hill, and after an hour's tramp in
the sun we came up to him in the middle of the rolling prairie. There
was not a tree for a mile, nor a single avenue of escape in case he
charg