ail waving angrily, and his mouth was opened in
a savage snarl. I could see that he didn't like me.

I raised the little .256 Mannlicher, aimed carefully at his open mouth
and fired. The lion turned a back somersault and a great thrill of
exultation suffused me. Already I saw the handsomely mounted lion-skin
rug ornamenting my den at home. We approached cautiously, always
remembering that the real danger of lion hunting comes after the lion
has been shot. We threw stones in the grass where he had lain, but no
answering growl was heard. I thought he was dead, but when we finally
reached the spot where he had been there was no sign of him. He had
vanished again. I searched the ravine and then crossed to the high grass
on the other side. Then we saw him for an instant, half-concealed, just
in front of us. His head was hanging, and he looked as though he had
been hard hit. Again he disappeared and we searched high and low for
him. For several hundred feet we beat the grass without result.

Then the grass was again fired and again the hoarse growl came in angry
protest. Walking slowly, with guns ready for instant use, we advanced
until we could see him under a tree seventy yards ahead on my side of
the ravine. He was growling angrily. This time I used the
double-barreled cordite rifle and the first shot struck him in the
forehead without knocking him down. He sprang up and the second shot
stretched him out. He was still alive when I came up to him, and a small
bullet was fired into the base of his brain to reduce the danger of a
final charge.

Old hunters always caution one about approaching a dying lion, for often
the beast musters up unexpected vitality, makes a final charge, kills
somebody, and then dies happy. So we waited a few feet away until the
last quiver of his sides had passed. One of the boys pulled his tail and
shook him, but there was no sign of life. He was extinct.

A new danger now threatened. The grass fire that the second gunbearer
had started was sweeping the prairie, fanned by a strong wind, and there
seemed to be not only the danger of abandoning the lion, but of being
forced to flee before the flames. So we fell to work beating out the
nearest fires, and trusted that a shifting of the wind would send the
course of the flames in another direction.

It was now four o'clock. We were nine miles from camp and food, and we
knew that at six o'clock darkness would suddenly descend, leaving us out
in a rhi