e white man had failed to
stop the beast with both barrels.

Even a woman will face a leopard with a torch of dry grass to contest
the ownership of a fat-tailed sheep which he has tried to filch from the
zareba by night, fearing his snarling menace far less than the wrath of
her lord and master if the marauder secures his prey.

As for the Midgan, that born hunter and nomadic outcast whom other
Somalis look down upon, but who has more woodcraft in his touzled head
than any of them, he will deliberately hunt the king of beasts, using
some decrepit and almost valueless camel as a stalking-horse. He is
armed with a bow having about as much apparent "give" in it as the
bottom joint of a fishing rod, yet able to propel with surprising force
a stumpy arrow cunningly poisoned with a wizard brew of viper venom and
the root of the tall box tree. His procedure is to drive his camel
slowly grazing toward some island of bush in which he has marked down a
lion, he himself being perched a-straddle behind the hump and directing
the animal's movements with kicks from one or other of his bare heels.
From his lofty observation point he at once spots the crouching approach
of the lion and slips off over the camel's rump to cover, whence he
speeds one of his venomous little shafts at close range. The outraged
monarch attacks the camel and the hunter keeps well aloof from the
subsequent confusion until the poison works and the lion is seized with
muscular convulsions, like those of tetanus, when he may safely approach
to gloat over his quarry. What is really remarkable is that the camel is
not invariably killed. I once met a Midgan on trek who showed me the
unmistakable claw-marks of a lion on his camel's neck and shoulders and
said he had used the animal on three such occasions; compared with
these desperate encounters the exploits of our white shikaris armed with
powerful modern rifles are insignificant.

One beast of prey, however, is feared and hated by every Somali man,
woman or child--hunter, shepherd or townsman--and that is the great,
spotted hyaena which slinks up by night to snap at face or breast of
sleeping folk and bolts into the gloom at the agonised shriek of his
mangled victim. The brute is cowardly enough to refuse encounter with an
able-bodied man awake and on the alert unless rendered desperate by
hunger, but his jaws are as strong as a lion's, and one snapping bite
does the mischief. I once helped the P.M.O. at Berbera