Turning Round
To Relieve Myself Of The Weight, As He Had One Paw On The Back Of My Head,
I Saw His Eyes Directed To Mebalwe, Who Was Trying To Shoot Him
At A Distance Of Ten Or Fifteen Yards.
His gun, a flint one,
missed fire in both barrels; the lion immediately left me,
and, attacking Mebalwe, bit his thigh.
Another man, whose life
I had saved before, after he had been tossed by a buffalo,
attempted to spear the lion while he was biting Mebalwe.
He left Mebalwe and caught this man by the shoulder, but at that moment
the bullets he had received took effect, and he fell down dead.
The whole was the work of a few moments, and must have been
his paroxysms of dying rage. In order to take out the charm from him,
the Bakatla on the following day made a huge bonfire over the carcass,
which was declared to be that of the largest lion they had ever seen.
Besides crunching the bone into splinters, he left eleven teeth wounds
on the upper part of my arm.
A wound from this animal's tooth resembles a gun-shot wound;
it is generally followed by a great deal of sloughing and discharge,
and pains are felt in the part periodically ever afterward.
I had on a tartan jacket on the occasion, and I believe
that it wiped off all the virus from the teeth that pierced the flesh,
for my two companions in this affray have both suffered
from the peculiar pains, while I have escaped with only the inconvenience
of a false joint in my limb. The man whose shoulder was wounded showed me
his wound actually burst forth afresh on the same month of the following year.
This curious point deserves the attention of inquirers.
The different Bechuana tribes are named after certain animals,
showing probably that in former times they were addicted to animal-worship
like the ancient Egyptians. The term Bakatla means "they of the monkey";
Bakuena, "they of the alligator"; Batlapi, "they of the fish": each tribe
having a superstitious dread of the animal after which it is called.
They also use the word "bina", to dance, in reference to
the custom of thus naming themselves, so that, when you wish to ascertain
what tribe they belong to, you say, "What do you dance?"
It would seem as if that had been a part of the worship of old.
A tribe never eats the animal which is its namesake,
using the term "ila", hate or dread, in reference to killing it.
We find traces of many ancient tribes in the country in individual members
of those now extinct, as the Batau, "they of the lion";
the Banoga, "they of the serpent"; though no such tribes now exist.
The use of the personal pronoun they, Ba-Ma, Wa, Va or Ova, Am-Ki, &c.,
prevails very extensively in the names of tribes in Africa.
A single individual is indicated by the terms Mo or Le.
Thus Mokwain is a single person of the Bakwain tribe,
and Lekoa is a single white man or Englishman - Makoa being Englishmen.
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