Another short story from Charles Cottar's book - THE EXCEPTION WAS TEH RULE.

"There remains the last but not least effective way to shoot a lion. But this is almost �verboten� in much of Africa. The night is lion�s game. You go out and shoot a zebra or have some other kill. Build a zariba (a fortification constructed from thorn brush, sticks and grass). Place them about in the form of a circle with a space inside large enough to accommodate two or three people with blankets and a camp chair or two. Build a door in the side opposite the kill through which to enter when evening comes. After this pull a substantial (previously selected) thorn brush to the door. Make sure it is possible to clear the door easily and quickly. You might, for more than one reason, want to exit in the night, that is if you can get on good terms with the lions. A lot depends on the lions.

Leave a hotel about 18 inches in diameter (never more than two feet) on the side next to the kill. This is called the porthole and will suffice to shoot through if you find it better to keep your head below the top of the zariba wall (the latter should be four feet high). When night comes, go to the zariba, or boma as it is more often called. Close the door, take a seat in the chair or lay on the blankets if you can persuade yourself to do it under the stress of darkness and proximity to lions being baited with raw meat. Without a pipe or cigarette (lions are afraid of tobacco smoke as it denotes to them that a nasty killer with two legs is in the area), put out baits and lay in wait. What? Settle into the chair. It is more tiresome than dangerous. You can see better and get up to run more quickly. You try to feel, with your hand running through your hair, that you are quite normal. Every noise makes chills run up and down your neck.

After dark a zebra, a member of the band from which you shot your kill, calls for its dead mate. Then you start and get action as regards your pounding heart. Way off down the river a hippo bellows. You are sure it was a lion and you look at the thin spots in the delicate walls of the boma and shudder. About the time your nerves return to normal from this disturbance, an ostrich booms from somewhere beyond and the echo sends wiggles up your spine. This requires you to temporarily evacuate your fortification. You come back relieved but still nervous. Then an oryx snorts, or a rhinoceros does, and you wish you had hired a full-fledged white guide and brought a steel cage with a timed lock. You also wish that you had divided up your money and made arrangements for a monument to be erected in the village square to your memory. The epitaph would read, �His bones were pulverized by a lion when on safari in Africa.�

Then for an hour all is silence, so silent that you hear the tick of your watch and threaten to stop it. So you still imagine that the sound of your own breathing will frighten away all the beasts of the forest. But it doesn�t. Right then a hyena lets loose one of those blood-curdling howls that ends up in the guttural sepulchral chatters called �a laugh.� You don�t laugh. No. No! You just chatter � or your teeth do. But you have read all about laughing hyenas and you know them by reputation to be a skulking swine afraid of its won shadow. The hyenas was only sent into this world to save it from being cluttered with graveyards. Hyenas will only eat dead stuff and they do it in a jovial, laughing way. Not bad fellows, what? The hyena pulls at the bait and makes a vent through which all the imprisoned gasses accumulated during the long hours will escape. A bait is really no good until it becomes gassy. The escape almost chokes you and you vow never again to be caught out in this situation.

A mosquito hums near your ear and you make a wicked pass at it with your hand. But you hit a cat-claw thorn that hooks into your bare flesh and you howl with pain. The hyena, being an elusive feeder, believes that it had been caught by something alive. So it bolts and you are again alone with the dead escaping gas. This eliminates more guesswork. You are pleased to be alone � almost proud of it � and thankful that you are. You are hopeful that the loneliness will continue until daylight. But you are again to be disturbed. Your reverie will be broken and all your hopeful solitude will be shattered.

A string of ants starts up your leg and you imagine that you are being slimed with some deadly acid, by a poisonous snake, preparatory to being swallowed alive. A disturbance in the grass about your feet where the bigger ones are tearing away makes you feel doubly sure you are to be swallowed by a python. You consider the ignoble and long to get it changed into death at the talons of a big lion.

A cricket sings. How beautiful is the night in the jungle. How soothing to one�s jaded nerves. Then downwind, or up, or across, comes the most gentle and soothing moan you have ever heard. It almost entices you to get up and yawn and open the door. You become faithful, trustful and full of confidence and would invite a stranger to share your last drop of �hooch.� You feel so confiding as the gentle moan swells up and up into a well recognized groan. Then your confidence in sounds begins to shrink. You wrack your mind to get assurance as to the exact attitude things that groan could assume toward you. The groan becomes deeper and more boisterous. You wish you had brought some friend in whom you have confidence: Father, brother, or some pal in crime. If that moan continues in volume it will not be long until your better senses tell you that either a comedy or a crime will be committed.

You sit up looking like you would in a big city mansion � shotgun across your front and a burglar trying to enter through a bolted window. Your wife is not there to reinforce you. A picture of your wife at home passes through the mind. You recall that good, patient, affectionate wife. The moan has grown into a throaty roar with a throbbing effect like that produced when a hard draft is turned into a furnace that is already a big fire.

Your native boy, who contrived to crawl under your chair, whispers, �Simba, Bwana,� and your arms and legs start to imitate a case of St.Vitus� dance. You have been told to �let the animals come up and eat.� Holy God! You wonder just what it is going to eat. Of course, it will eat man-meat. You wonder whether it will eat it straight or with sauce. You get some relief thinking that it might pass you up.

What a relief! Just then the lion leaps from the cover of the bush right before your eyes and with the groan transformed into a very load roar, it leaps toward the boma and the kill. It seizes the zebra and had you not tied it to a tree would have carried it off. Inwardly you curse the boy for having tied the bait to make the lion eat right there before your very eyes. If you are not frightened stiff you will be fascinated until you forget that you have traveled a few thousand miles to shoot a lion.

Don�t get rattled. Keep your nerve even though your spine twists into a figure eight and your hair discards your hat. If there is enough meat on the kill the lion won�t bother you. It is just a thief and presumes you are asleep and that it is stealing your meat. Then if you think of it and decide to shoot, be very careful. Don�t yell, �Scat.� It might frighten the lion away. Worse, it might be temperamental and come for you. No, you must be careful, very careful.

Slip the safety noiselessly. Cut from your imagination all ideas of bad feelings or semblance of fear of simbra. Don�t look at its ears. Carefully, without the slightest squeak of the chair or your boots, bring the rifle into position, well below the line of final aim. Then raise it up as high as you are sure it will not be too high and switch on the lamp. Either flash or spot so that the light will travel down the barrel through the sights and finally rest on the shoulder or head of the beast head on. Don�t jerk. Squeeze and sit still, looking down the rifle if you can after the report of the gun that has drowned all other sounds and a recoil that has rendered you without feeling other than that of shock.

This is the hardest thing about lion shooting from a boma. When the light goes on and the rifle cracks or the bullet hits, the lion is sure to roar. And it won�t be that inviting, soothing moan either. It will be a full-sized lion roar in capital letters underscored about three times and in black type. When the light shows that the cat is down on its side and the night sounds have all ceased, including the echoes of the rifle, spring to your feet. With the light on the carcass, when it looks best, pump another bullet into the beast to be sure it is dead. Then be careful that hyenas don�t carry it off in the night.

Don�t leave the boma just because you want to see where you hit your first lion. It might have a wife, children or other relatives who would naturally hold some animus against you for shooting the head of the family. Sit low and keep still just like the shooting was a part of nature. Keep your eyes skinned because some other leonine creature might come on the kill or be near enough to see what happened to the first member of the band. If you are wise and careful you might accomplish a double kill, or even more, in one night on the same bait. Don�t go to sleep. This is very important. Hyena might come on the scene and eat your first lion, assuming that you have killed one. Sometimes you don�t hit, or you make a bad shot at 20 feet on an animal as large as an ox. The reason is because it looks as big as an elephant and you hit somewhere on the outer rim where your eyes paint imaginary boundaries. Or you hit in the outer regions of its real appearance.

In these cases the lion bounds off into the grass or bush leaving perhaps a bloody spoor to be followed with a lot of interest in the morning. For this procedure turn back to instructions on spooring to their morning drink only be more careful and wise for now you are dealing with a cripple and it knows what it is up against. It is like in the old days in the west when law officials trailed criminals. They shot first and asked questions later.

When trailing wounded lion, keep your gun at full cock and no pressure on the trigger so that it won�t go off until you move the muzzle. When his royal highness twists its tail in the grass and first starts a guttural warning that it is coming, throw the muzzle of the rifle toward the sound. If there is room, and time enough put the gun to your shoulder, look down the sights, line them up perfectly and pull, not squeeze. If there be not time for all these preliminaries, as soon as you locate accurately where the animals is � and I mean exactly where its body occupies space � throw your gun with the barrel pointing toward the body. Keep the stock in your hands and pull. This is known as shooting from the hip and it requires a lot of practice. For this one might read Instructions on Fundamental Rifle Shooting."

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saeed@ emirates.net.ae

www.accuratereloading.com

Saeed,

Thankyou, what a truly great story.

Now who was the sport that condemed the shooting of lions at night as an unsportsmanlike practice, as I recall he said anyone could do that! (grin)

And he is correct, anyone with a set of brass balls can do that...A wounded lion on your hands at night, now thats a kick...

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Ray Atkinson

ray@atkinsonhunting.com
atkinsonhunting.com

I felt many of those same emotions the first night I spent in a leopard blind. Every noise was strange, the stars in the heavens weren't the stars I was accustomed to watching and you are alone with your thoughts. All your old sins and evil deeds (no matter how slight) come back to run thru your mind and convince you that you don't deserve a leopard. You're convinced that every rustle of the wind is a leopard walking by the blind unseen. You doze and come awake with a start. You look as the shadow of the PH as he sits calmly next to you, unmoving. Time drags and drags and drags. Where is the leopard? You peel back the cover on your watch face and it's only been 4 hours and time slowly marches on and on and on....hours later it's only 5 hours. Finally you doze off and the next thing you know the PH has his hand on your arm.....your heart and mind race and you can't breathe. The PH has his head cocked to one side listening but with the pounding in your ears you can't hear a
thing. Slowly you regain control, your breathing slows and you begin to think about making the shot you dreamed about for years but then the PH takes his hand from your arm and shakes head.... a false alarm. His head drops and he seems to doze off but you are left in an adrenelin high that gets you thru the next hour or so. Finally it's dawn but you continue to sit in the blind enjoying the dawn of a new day in Africa. I love it. I hate it. I love it. I'll keep going back.

Great stuff, Saeed. Wasn't Charles Cottar killed by a lion he faced with a .405 Winchester 1895? He was an American after all, wasn't he? I have never read his book, just read of him in others works. I will certainly be on the lookout for his books. Thanks for sharing these vignettes of Africa.
That buffalo tail bullseye was great too.

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Good huntin' and shootin',
RAB

RAB,

You're right, he was an American. And the story of his death will be posted too.

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saeed@ emirates.net.ae

www.accuratereloading.com

Ray,

Was it me? I think I was referring to the truck bit anyhow I'm willing to be educated (sometimes).

Hunting anything big and mean at night takes alot of B*lls, I would have to leave the 45-70 home that night.

and opt for something with a wie bit more power, that is if i could muster the nerve to hunt a Lion at night in the first place..