It was a snap at nothing, and missed. Then in an
opening on the edge a hundred yards away appeared one of the
lionesses. She was trotting slowly, and on her I had time to draw
a hasty aim. At the shot she bounded high in the air, fell,
rolled over, and was up and into the thicket before I had much
more than time to pump up another shell from the magazine. Memba
Sasa in his eagerness got in the way-the first and last time he
ever made a mistake in the field.
By this time the others had got hold of their weapons. We fronted
the blank face of the thicket.
The wounded animal would stand a little waiting. We made a wide
circle to the other side of the stream. There we quickly picked
up the trail of the two uninjured beasts. They had headed
directly over the hill, where we speedily lost all trace of them
on the flint-like surface of the ground. We saw a big pack of
baboons in the only likely direction for a lion to go. Being thus
thrown back on a choice of a hundred other unlikely directions,
we gave up that slim chance and returned to the thicket.
This proved to be a very dense piece of cover. Above the height
of the waist the interlocking branches would absolutely prevent
any progress, but by stooping low we could see dimly among the
simpler main stems to a distance of perhaps fifteen or twenty
feet.
