Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

368 THINKING BLACK
too sudden for it to have been a miss. Then came day-
break and the discovery of our nocturnal damages ;
as for
the canoes, the breakages were merely in the singular and
not in the plural, but how singular—only the fifth boat
crunched to pieces ! So, too, the lions ; one only had
been wounded, and she caused a lot of trouble before she
died. Shimpauka, one of the right sort, followed her up
but lost traces in the tangle, then stupidly let go his best
charge at a buck, reloading with only a poor pinch of
powder as he presumed he had lost the lion. Hardly,
however, had his gun spoken when he discovered his
stupid error. For there, sure enough, and only a dozen
paces farther ahead, lay my lady, not nearly dead but
merely nursing her broken leg. If she offers battle (and
she must), then she will fight and fight to the death.
Then the terrible trouble began, for the dense growth had
spoiled matters and forced him to see this thing through
—retreat impossible. So he drew a careful bead on the
lioness, the thought maddening him the while that here
he was firing a stupid squib, sure only to jag the exas-
perated beast into mad recrimination. And what do
you think? There you see the doleful duel begin in
which, tit-for-tat, the wrath of a man is matched against
the wrath of a lioness. Their blood is up. On rushes
the beast and on rushes the black ! The
strong, strapping
fellow, in a frenzy of determination, and longing to get it
over, hugs the huge lioness in a strangling grasp, and over
they go on the ground in a whirl of man and lion. The
lioness has dug her claws into the mass of muscle on the