When the nervous force is entire, terrible wounds may be inflicted without killing; a tsessebe having been shot through the neck while quietly feeding, we went to him, and one of the men cut his throat deep enough to bleed him largely.  He started up after this and ran more than a mile, and would have got clear off had not a dog brought him to bay under a tree, where we found him standing.

My men, having never had fire-arms in their hands before, found it so difficult to hold the musket steady at the flash of fire in the pan, that they naturally expected me to furnish them with “gun medicine”, without which, it is almost universally believed, no one can shoot straight.  Great expectations had been formed when I arrived among the Makololo on this subject; but, having invariably declined to deceive them, as some for their own profit have done, my men now supposed that I would at last consent, and thereby relieve myself from the hard work of hunting by employing them after due medication.  This I was most willing to do, if I could have done it honestly; for, having but little of the hunting ‘furore’ in my composition, I always preferred eating the game to killing it.  Sulphur is the remedy most admired, and I remember Sechele giving a large price for a very small bit.  He also gave some elephants’ tusks, worth 30 Pounds, for another medicine which was to make him invulnerable to musket balls.  As I uniformly recommended that these things should be tested by experiment, a calf was anointed with the charm and tied to a tree.  It proved decisive, and Sechele remarked it was “pleasanter to be deceived than undeceived.”  I offered sulphur for the same purpose, but that was declined, even though a person came to the town afterward and rubbed his hands with a little before a successful trial of shooting at a mark.

I explained to my men the nature of a gun, and tried to teach them, but they would soon have expended all the ammunition in my possession.  I was thus obliged to do all the shooting myself ever afterward.  Their inability was rather a misfortune; for, in consequence of working too soon after having been bitten by the lion, the bone of my left arm had not united well.  Continual hard manual labor, and some falls from ox-back, lengthened the ligament by which the ends of the bones were united, and a false joint was the consequence.  The limb has never been painful, as those of my companions on the day of the rencounter with the lion have been, but, there being a joint too many, I could not steady the rifle, and was always obliged to shoot with the piece resting on the left shoulder.  I wanted steadiness of aim, and it generally happened that the more hungry the party became, the more frequently I missed the animals.