Free Man-Eaters by Edgar Rice Burroughs Page A

spring and hide from the complexities and tumult of civilization. When they finally pried the cover off the box they found the cameraman in one comer with the camera on top of him and the lioness in the other. It has always been a question which was the more terrified. The assistant cameraman had gone out the hole the lioness came in. He swears by all that is holy that he went out at the same time the lioness was coming in. No one was hurt. Why? I answered that question in the first paragraph — a lion
    is unpredictable.
    These two incidents might lead one to the erroneous belief that lions are cowardly animals and far from dangerous. They are very dangerous beasts, and far from cowardly. A few years ago a shot was being made at the old Selig Zoo in Los Angeles. The lion was supposed to leap from a platform onto a man dressed in some kind of skins. I do not know why a dummy was not used. It seemed impossible to get the lion to leap from the high platform; so a device was rigged up wherewith a current of electricity could be shot through the lion after he was in position on the platform. It was a splendid idea, and it worked to perfection. The lion leaped onto the man and killed him.
    As an instance of a lion's courage, Sir Alfred E. Pease recounts in his The Book of the Lion an adventure that proves that one lion at least was courageous to the point of temerity, and there are many other recorded instances to bear out his contention — such, for instance, as lions entering villages at night and carrying off their victims in the face of fire brands, spears, clubs, shouting men and screaming women. Sir Alfred and two friends had run a lion to cover in a tiny reed bed where it had lain down out of sight. The three men were armed with a 10-bore rifle, a .404 Jefferey cordite rifle, and a double-barrelled .450 cordite. They agreed that it was impossible for a lion to get through this array of firearms, and so decided to go straight on to him at once on foot. Sir Alfred was quite sure the lion would charge, but equally confident they could stop hin before he reached any of them. They walked up to within nine paces of him, being on ground that sloped downward to the little patch of reeds which concealed him. There they halted, and one of them threw a stone that brought the lion out with a terrific grunt — flying straight at them. Mind you, this was a fat, gorged, unwounded lion which could have just as well run away from them, as a cowardly animal would have done. The three men fired simultaneously without any apparent result. One of the shots only slightly wounded the lion; another of the hunters got in at least two shots, one of which struck the lion full in the nose, breaking teeth, cutting along the roof of the mouth, and lodging in the base of the skull; one shot struck where neck and shoulder join, passed under the shoulder blade, raking along the lion's ribs till it lodged in the skin at his hip. All of these shots appeared to have no effect on the charge, and might as well have been misses as far as the safety of the hunters was concerned. Fortunately for them the shot from Sir Alfred's second barrel, fired at only five paces, bowled the lion over. Who may say that this was not a courageous lion to face so much greater odds and charge into such heavy firing?
    One cannot but feel regret that it should be necessary to kill so noble a beast; but he had rather invited destruction, as he was one of a group of lions that laired on Sir Alfred's property, often making their kills by day in plain sight of the house and frequenting the main path to it, making it, as Sir Alfred says, "jumpy for every one of us when taking this track home at nightfall." I should think so!
    All lions are not man-eaters; but there have been innumerable instances recorded of men, women, and children being devoured by lions. These are usually old lions which have not the speed and agility to catch their natural prey and have become man-eaters by first