Page:Seven Years in South Africa v2.djvu/310

 or not, to go into the thicket and rummage about with their spears.

It was a very pandemonium. The screaming and yelling of the negroes was quite unearthly, and the noise seemed to grow louder and more frightful as their courage increased at not finding any lion to alarm them. Maranzian, with his four men that had guns, was standing about twenty yards in front of me. We were beginning to think that we were again baulked, when, like a flash of lightning, a lioness made a tremendous spring out of its concealment, and then another spring as sudden into the very midst of the excited crowd of hunters. There were so many of them scattered about between me and the angry brute, that it was out of the question to think of firing, and it made a third bound, and disappeared into another thicket close behind; it knocked over several of the men, but fortunately it did not hurt any of them seriously.

Without the loss of a moment, Maranzian sent his men to drive the lioness to the very extremity of her new retreat. It rather surprised us to find the dogs perfectly silent as we followed them into the thicket, but before long we heard them barking vehemently in the open ground beyond; they had driven out the brute, and were in full pursuit.

As he saw the lioness bounding away in the distance, with the dogs at her heels, Cowley was terribly chagrined at having abandoned his former position, and sighed over his lost chance of adding to his rising renown as a lion-hunter.

Only an artist’s pencil could properly depict the scene at this moment. The plain was more than half a mile long, and nearly as wide; bushwood