e
were naturally in a tremendous hurry; and the footing among those
boulders and rounded rocks was so vile that a very slow trot was the
best we could accomplish. And that was only by standing in our stirrups,
and holding up our horses' heads by main strength. We reached the
sky-line in time to see a herd of game stampeding away from a depression
a half-mile away. We fixed our eyes on that point, and a moment later
saw the lion or lioness, as it turned out, leap a gully and come out the
other side.

The footing down this slope, too, was appalling, consisting mainly of
chunks of lava interspersed with smooth, rounded stones and sparse tufts
of grass. In spite of the stones we managed a sort of stumbling gallop.
Why we did not all go down in a heap I do not know. At any rate we had
no chance to watch our quarry, for we were forced to keep our eyes
strictly to our way. When finally we emerged from that tumble of rocks,
she had disappeared.

Either she had galloped out over the plains, or she had doubled back to
take cover in the ravine. In the latter case she would stand. Our first
job, therefore, was to determine whether she had escaped over the open
country. To this end we galloped our horses madly in four different
directions, pushing them to the utmost, swooping here and there in wide
circles. That was an exhilarating ten minutes until we had surmounted
every billow of the plain, spied in all directions, and assured
ourselves beyond doubt that she had not run off. The horses fairly flew,
spurning the hard sod, leaping the rock dikes, skipping nimbly around
the pig holes, turning like cow-ponies under pressure of knee and rein.
Finally we drew up, converged, and together jogged our sweating horses
back to the ravine. There we learned from the boys that nothing more had
been seen of our quarry.

We dismounted, handed our mounts to their syces, and prepared to make
afoot a clean sweep of the wide, shallow ravine. Here was where the dogs
came in handy. We left a rearguard of two men, and slowly began our
beat.

The ravine could hardly be called a ravine; rather a shallow depression
with banks not over a foot high, and with a varying width of from two to
two hundred feet. The grass grew very patchy, and not very high; in
fact, it seemed hardly tall enough to conceal anything as large as a
lioness. We men walked along the edge of this depression, while the dogs
ranged back and forth in its bottom.

We had gone thus a