In Zululand I had a second and third meetings with lions at night. My fellow cricket collector Bill Cade and I had been collecting at St. Lucia Bay and were returning to Hlabisa after midnight. From the coastal plain a gravel road winds through rolling bush country up to a high grassy hill then descends again briefly before making its final ascent to Hlabisa. Hlabisa village began as a mission station established by my grandfather nearly a hundred years ago. Even then the lions no longer existed there, for they had been shot out by hunters seeking adventure in northern Zululand. But due to conservation efforts the lions are back.
Coming around a bend we came upon two enormous male lions standing in the road. As I drove up to them they walked to the side of the road and laid down. Bill was asleep. I poked him gently and pointed out his window.
"What's going on?" he asked, groggily, and then almost immediately, "OH, MAN!"
After a good long look he asked: "Weren't we planning to collect around here tomorrow night?"
I said: "Yes. We'll be O.K. " At that time I believed that we would be quite safe, though I became much more apprehensive after hearing that after a ranger had been killed nearby.
The following day: The river bed was dry. We stopped in the middle of it and contemplated the dense forest and reeds which loomed close about us. Although earlier in the day this had promised to be an excellent place to collect, we began to lose our nerve in the gloom of evening, and the presence of lion footprints around the car convinced us that it was perhaps foolhardy to leave the car here; and so we drove up onto a well-grazed grassland with only scattered thorn trees. Now, at least we would be able to see about us. At the crest of a hill we were attracted to the ringing sound of numerous crickets some 50 yards from the road. It was a concentration of crickets in a rhino wallow. With no water in the wallow, we thought it unlikely that a rhino would molest us, so collecting was going to be superb. We captured one cricket after another and became quite absorbed by our good luck. Occasionally we briefly shone our lights about, but seeing nothing returned to our crouched positions. We were busy extracting a cricket from a muddy burrow with a straw when suddenly there was a loud growl.
"What the hell is that?" Bill whispered.
"Lion! Time to go!" I said. We spotted the lion almost immediately.
"To the car!"
We continued to shine our lights in the direction of the lion but it was no longer visible. Like the Serengeti lion, this one had looked at our lights only momentarily and then become invisible as it looked away. We walked rapidly and should have reached the car in just a few seconds. But we had already walked too far and there was no car! We stood there puzzled, listening, looking, frightened. The sounds of hundreds of frogs ahead of us told us that we had gone in the wrong direction.
"We've come the wrong way."
Bill was silent as he swiveled around, piercing the darkness with his headlamp.
"We'll have to go back to the wallow and get our bearings."
"Oh, Wonderful!," was all he managed to say. We walked back, lights flashing nervously back and forth. Back at the wallow we could see the car plainly and we walked quickly towards it. We sat in the car for some time with hearts pounding.
Farther along the track we were soon attracted to an unusual cricket song which neither of us recognized. After locating the cricket singing at the mouth of a burrow, I reached for my hunting knife which I use to extracting crickets from. It was not in its sheath.
"My knife's back at the wallow. We'll have to go back."
"You're JOKING!"
"I'm serious."
"How about buying another knife?"
I explained to him that I had had the knife since I was twelve. That it was from Lang's Sporting Goods in Decorah, Iowa, and that it meant a lot to me.
Bill was reluctant to go, and I'm sure he wondered whether I valued my knife more than my life. We approached the wallow again hoping that we would not see the lion. When we found the knife we decided to quit for the night.
The potential seriousness of this encounter was impressed upon me later at Umfolozi. An incident had taken place in the late afternoon. Two rangers on patrol were returning to camp on horseback. They were riding single file along a gentle slope between two hills unaware that they were being stalked by lions. They had done this on many occasions without incident and were relaxed as they rode along.
The attack came quickly and without warning. Certainly there was no time to avoid the rush. As the lions closed in, the horses went into a gallop, but the lions were on both sides now and converged on the man in the rear. As the ranger in front galloped away he could hear his companion being attacked and heard his last desperate shouts: "He's got me!” There was nothing to do but race back to camp to get help. Armed with guns, the team rode to the site of the attack. Only a part of his skull and a leg bone remained.
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