“Indeed!”

“I once asked a Bushman, ‘How do you live?’ His reply was, ’I live by the lions.’  I asked him to explain to me.  He said, ’I will show what I do:  I let the lions follow the game and kill it and eat till they have their bellies full, then I go up to where the lion is sitting down by the carcass, and I go pretty near to him; I cry out, What have you got there, can not you spare me some of it?  Go away and let me have some meat, or I’ll do you some harm.  Then I dance and jump about and shake my skin-dress, and the lion looks at me, and he turns round and walks away; he growls very much, but he don’t stay, and then I eat the rest.’”

“And is that true?”

“Yes, I believe it, as I have had it confessed by many others.  The fact is, the lion is only dangerous when he is hungry—­that is, if he is not attacked; and if, as the Bushman said, the lion has eaten sufficiently, probably not wishing to be disturbed, after his repast, by the presence and shouts of the Bushman, the animal retires to some other spot.  I was informed that a very short time afterward, this Bushman, who told me what I have detailed to you, was killed by a lioness, when attempting to drive it away from its prey by shouting as he was used to do.  The fact was, that he perceived a lioness devouring a wild horse, and went up to her as usual; but he did not observe that she had her whelps with her:  he shouted; she growled savagely, and before he had time to retreat, she sprang upon him and tore him to pieces.”

“The lion does not prey upon men, then, although he destroys them?”

“Not generally; but the Namaqua people told me that, if a lion once takes a fancy to men’s flesh—­and they do, after they have in their hunger devoured one or two—­they become doubly dangerous, as they will leave all other game and hunt man only; but this I can not vouch for being the truth, although it is very probable.”

“If we judge from analogy, it is,” replied the Major.  “The Bengal tigers in India, it is well known, if they once taste human flesh, prefer it to all other, and they are well known to the natives, who term them man-eaters.  Strange to say, it appears that human flesh is not wholesome for them; for their skins become mangy after they have taken to eating that alone.  I have shot a ‘man-eater’ from the back of an elephant, and I found that the skin was not worth taking.”

“The Namaquas,” replied Swinton, “told me that a lion, once enamored of human flesh, would, in order to obtain it so far overcome his caution, that he would leap through a fire to seize a man.  I once went to visit a Namaqua chief, who had been severely wounded by a lion of this description—­a man-eater, as the Major terms them,—­and he gave me the following dreadful narrative, which certainly corroborates what they assert of the lion who had once taken a fancy to human flesh.

“The chief told me that he had gone out with a party of his men to hunt:  they had guns, bows and arrows, and assaguays.  On the first day, as they were pursuing an elephant, they came across some lions, who attacked them and they were obliged to save their lives by abandoning a horse, which the lions devoured.  They then made hiding-places of thick bushes by a pool, where they knew the elephant and rhinoceros would come to drink.