hen I tell you that in
this army of ours of at least 30,000 men I have only had two cases of
mauling by the larger carnivora to deal with. And such cases as these
would all pass through my hands. There was only one case of lion
mauling, and that a Cape Boy who met a young half-grown cub on the road
and unwisely ran from it. At first curiosity attracted this animal, and
later the hunting instinct caused him to maul his prey. So they brought
him in with the severe blood-poisoning that sets in in almost all cases
of such a nature. For the teeth and claws of the larger carnivora are
frightfully infectious. This Cape Boy died in forty-eight hours. Yet one
other case was that of an officer who met a leopardess with cubs in the
bush when out after guinea fowl. She charged him, and he gave her his
left arm to chew to save his face and body. Then alarmed by his yells
and the approach of his companion she left him, and he was brought one
hundred miles to the railway. But he was in good hands at once, and when
I saw him the danger of blood-poisoning had gone and he was well upon
his way to health again.

The same experience have we had with snakes. The hot dry dusty roads and
the torn scrub abound with snakes and most of them of a virulently
poisonous quality. But one case only of snake-bite have I seen, and that
a native. The fact that the wild denizens of the field and forest are
much more afraid of us than we of them saves us from what might appear
to be very serious menace. Even the wounded left out in the dense bush
have not suffered from these animal pests, but the dead, of course, have
often disappeared and their bleached bones alone are left to tell the
story. One might think that the hyaena, the universal scavenger, would
be as loathed by the native as he is by us whose dead he disinters at
night, if we have been too tired or unable to bury our casualties deep
enough. But, strange as it may seem, the hyaena is worshipped by one
very large tribe in East Africa, the Kikuyu. For these strange people
have an extraordinary aversion to touching dead people. So much so, that
when their own relatives seem about to die they put them out in the bush
with a small fire and a gourd of water, protected by a small erection of
bush against the mid-day sun, and leave the hyaenas to do the rest. So
it comes about that this beast is almost sacred, and a white man who
kills one runs some danger of his life, if the crime is discovered. It
is