Of
Course I Said I Should Be Delighted - I Was Always
Ready For A Hunt When It Was Possible For Me
To Get Away, And As Just At The Time We Were
"Held Up" By The Athi River, I Could Manage
A Day Off Quite Easily.
So we made the usual
preparations for a day's absence from camp -
filled our water-bottles with tea, put
A loaf of
bread and a tin of sardines in our haversacks,
looked carefully to our rifles and ammunition;
and warned the "boys" who were to accompany
us as beaters to be ready before dawn. I decided
to make a very early start, as I knew that the
most likely place for lions lay some distance away,
and I wanted to get there if possible by daybreak.
We should thus have a better chance of catching
one of the lords of the plain as he returned
from his nightly depredations to the kindly shelter
of the tall grass and rushes which fringed the
banks of the river. We therefore retired to rest
early, and just as I was dozing off to sleep, one
of my Indian servants, Roshan Khan, put his
head through the slit at my tent door and asked
leave to accompany the "Sahibs" in the morning
so that he might see what shikar (hunting) was
like. This request I sleepily granted, thinking
that it could make little difference whether he
came with us or stayed behind in camp. As
things turned out, however, it made all the
difference in the world, for if he had not accompanied
us, my shikar would in all probability have ended
disastrously next day.
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