place that I have already described. We jumped up perfectly mad with
horror and fear, and rushed wildly after her, firing shots at
haphazard on the chance that she would be frightened by them into
dropping her prey, but nothing could we see, and nothing could we
hear. The lioness had vanished into the darkness, taking Jim-Jim with
her, and to attempt to follow her till daylight was madness. We should
only expose ourselves to the risk of a like fate.

[*] I have known a lion carry a two-year-old ox over a stone wall four
feet high in this fashion, and a mile away into the bush beyond.
He was subsequently poisoned by strychnine put into the carcass of
the ox, and I still have his claws.--Editor.

"So with scared and heavy hearts we crept back to the skerm, and sat
down to wait for the dawn, which now could not be much more than an
hour off. It was absolutely useless to try even to disentangle the
oxen till then, so all that was left for us to do was to sit and
wonder how it came to pass that the one should be taken and the other
left, and to hope against hope that our poor servant might have been
mercifully delivered from the lion's jaws.

"At length the faint dawn came stealing like a ghost up the long slope
of bush, and glinted on the tangled oxen's horns, and with white and
frightened faces we got up and set to the task of disentangling the
oxen, till such time as there should be light enough to enable us to
follow the trail of the lioness which had gone off with Jim-Jim. And
here a fresh trouble awaited us, for when at last with infinite
difficulty we had disentangled the great helpless brutes, it was only
to find that one of the best of them was very sick. There was no
mistake about the way he stood with his legs slightly apart and his