A MODERN NIMROD.

Press, Volume L, Issue 8476, 6 May 1893, Page 9

A MODERN NIMROD.

STORIES OF A GREAT AFRICAN HUNTERSTRIKING ADVENTURES AND NARROW ESCAPED. Mr Stead's " Character Sketch" in the April number of the Review of Reviews deals with Mr F. C. Scions, the great African traveller and sportsman. Allan Qnartermain being the most famous hunter of coutemperary fiction, and Mr Selous being the most famous living hunter, the public has janipetl to the coa elusion that Mr Selous h_s the crigiual from which Mr Haggard drew the hero of bis romance. It may ba so, Mr Stead remarks, bat if so, tne novelist has takeu more thau the ordinary liberty in sketching his portrait. Allan Quartermain is a little aud ugly man, Mr Selous stands five feet, eight aud a kilf inches, weighs twelve stone, and is a man of prepossessing and attractive appearance. He lias had a most interesting and adventurous life, as the following extracts will show : — now HE -IEUAN. From his youth up Mr Selous was seized with a passion for wandering adventure, which cuuld only be satisfied iv far oilier lands thau ours; and, leaving England behind him, he began his career of adventure in South Africa at the early age of nineteen. This was ia September, 1871. He started life with £400 m his pockets, aud a xroustitution that was worth many hundred pounds. He remained in the hunting liald from 1871 till 1876. After a year in Knglaud he returned to his first love, and spent another five years in the African interior. He returned home in 1831 for a brief visit; but since then, although he has »wice ruH over to the old country during the ie-ason, he has practically made South Africa his home. For the last three years he has been working with the Chartered Company in Moshonalond. AN IBO.V CONSTITUTION. It. must be admitted that Mr Selous deserves to be numbered among the. natural miracles that occasionally occur, as if to piove the falsity of ail the rules and regulations of the physicians. For twenty years of his life he has .set at nought almost every cat Jut of health. He has exposed himself recklessly under African suns, undergoing the mo3t violent exertions bare-headed aud bmr_*-tegged in a temperature which w?s congenial only to the salamander. He has literally lived in the open through the long month*" of a heavy rainy season without a tent or a waterproof, sleeping night after night in the open without opium or alcohol, or'- any prophylactic except quinine and Warburg s fever mixture. Mr Selous is an enthusiastic believer in Warburg. In this he resembles General Gordon, who, however, shared his allegiance with Cookie. Mr ! Selous does not seem ever to have need of ! Cockle, or Beecham, or any other stomachic pill. During the whole of his African . journeying, he had only once for three days in the "last twelve months of his sojourn there-sxperienced even a temporary trouble ! of his digestive apparatus. Surely with all j the patent digesters conceived by the ima- i gi__tion of man, that which was packed up U-U'de the corporation of Mr Selous deserves the first prize. To drink the muddiest of ' water, to suck a few drops of stagnant moisture through the sand, and to have no other beverage for three or four days at a time ; to be parched with thirst until his throat was •o dry that when water was at last procured it could hardly be swallowed; to eat monotonously twice a day for a month together ib* same kind of meat without any broad .or vegetables; to be compelled to consume the flesh' of ail manner of clean and unclean beasts in various stages of putridity—to do th-Twith an African sun beating down on your head during the day, while you are shivering and freezing at night in a cold ■evere enough to coat the tea in your pot with fee ; to do all this for year after year, to turn up as right as a trivit or as tight as a drum—surely no internal fittings of the human being were ever exposed to so severe % test without succumbing. IOBKNGULA'S "BOY." Imagine a young man of nineteen starting off into the unknown with a rifle in his hand, sufficient capital in his pocket, and asking nothing of the world save liberty to shoot. Theie you have young Mr Selous, Who was such a stripling wiiea he first stood before Lobengula that the great king of the Maiabele refused to give him leave to hunt elephants. " You hunt elephants !'"' he •aid; .*' you are only a boy ; you had better hunt antelopes." Ib was only afber much pertinacity and patient waiting that the required permission was accorded, and then fortunately without the usual restrictions. "You are only a boy, you can shoot anywhere,'' opened up to Mr Selous the pick of Lobengula's preserves. The old savage little suspected whab a Nimrod he was letting loose upon his wild herds. No such chance is ever likely to fall to an English youngster again, at least not iv tnose regions. A NABEOW ESCAPE. Hit narrowest escape froth death by an elephant took place oa September 17th, 18?8, when Mr Selous with George Wood and" their Kaffirs slaughtered a herd of near the Umbila_ River. There were some sixty or seventy animals in the hard, twenty-two of which they shot. They had a long day of ib, and his horse was dead beat. Once Mr Selous only gob away by the skin of his teeth, for an elephant bull charged him, furiously trumpeting all the time like & railway engine, while hia horse was so tired it would only canter. After the herd was nearly destroyed, Mr, Seloia hod an adventure with a cow elephant which nearly proved fatal. He shot her first behind the shoulder, and then again between the neck and the shoulder. On receiving this second wound she backed a few..paces, flapped her ears,, and then charged. Mr Selous in vaiu sparred ids horse ; the poor beast vaa.'too worn out to galkip, i_ a moment the elephant was upon them. Mr Selous heard two short sharp screams above his head—" All's up," he thought—and tbeu the task of the elephant struck with terrifio force iuto the rear of his horse, and he was dashed to the "ground, Although half stunned by the fall, he felt he waa uahort, but the smell of the elephant Waa very strong, And no wonder, for the huge animal was kneeling over him ; ha had fortunately beeu thrown under itt body. Had he been in front of the loreleg*, he wottld never have lived to tell the laic. ' He wrenched himself loose, wriggled out from beneath her, and escaped into the bash. His eye was bruised, all the skin was TOhbed off his right breast, but beyond JaaUag very stiff in the neck and down the back he was -none the worse. His chief regret was that the elephant escaped. Hia horse; although badly wounded, also survived the encounter. CHASED *V AN ELEPHANT. . Elephants are gruesome cattle to be at Jlose quarters with. Poor Quabeet, a Kaffir who served George Wood, was killed by a tuskless bulL Quabeet was pursuiug him when he suddenly charged, and, seizing the hunter with his trunk, knelt on his stomach, and then literally wrenched him into three pieces. The head, chest and arms were thrown on one side. Then a leg and thigh Were torn off, and tha elephant, having wreaked its fury, departed. Mr Selous had *aay narrow escapes from elephants when hunting on foot. One of his most exciting days was in the valley of Debt Mr Selous, with Wood, was stalking a herd in a dense bash. They had fired and hit some bulls. Mr Scions'was going in hot pursuit of a wounded bull " when suddenly the trunk of ancUier elephant was whirled round, almost literally above my head, and a short sharp scream of rage thrilled through mc, making the blood tingle down to the very tips of my fingers. How I got away I scarcely knew. I bounded ever and through thorn bushes, which ia cold blood I should have deemed impossible; but I was urged on by the short piercing screams, which, repeated in quick saccetsion, seemed to make the whole air vibate, and by the fear of finding myself encircled by the trunk or transfixed by the tusk of the enraged animaL After a few seconds (I don't think she pursued mc a hundred yards, though it seemed an age) the seteaming ceased,'" It was a near shave. Mr Selous emerged from the bush stark __i oxters* or bis scab. He always hunts bare-legged when on foot, weaiing only a flannel shirt girt round

his loins, with a leathern girdle and a hat. In plunguig through the" bushes threefourths of .his shirt, the girdle, and the hat had disappeared, and there was hardly a square inch of skin on his front uninjured by the thorns. His adventures, however, had not ceased. He resumed the pursuit of .the bull, aud, firing at him at short range with an elephant gun loaded twice over by mistake, ho very nearly lost his life. The explosion lifted him clean from the groundHe turned a somersault and fell face downwards, the gun flying yards away in the rear. His face was covered with blood, caused by a deep cnt two inches long, made in his cheek by ihe recoiJiug gan. His shoulder was injured ; he could not lift his right arm ; but, notwithstanding all this, he went after the elephant again, and contrived to get another shot. His attendant, panic strickeu, declared that his master was bewitched; but he still pursued tbe elephant. Tins time he had te face another charge. He was within twenty yards, charging at full speed through the grass, when he was stopped by a four ounce ball on the head. He was not killed, however, aud ultimately the whole herd gob off without loiiug a single tusk. KLEPHANTIANA. Mr Selous is full of elephant stories. He has killed over a hundred of these monstrous pachyderms. He says that although they smell a man very quickly, they do not discern him well wibh their eyes. If he stands quite motionless, the odds are they will mistake Lini for a tree or a stump, and leave him alone. African elephants stand about ten feet high, and their tusks weigh from 50 to 701b_ each. The most edible part of the elephant is the heart, after that its foot and its trunk. The elephant is a natural reservoir of fat, and out of his cavernous interior the natives carefully excavate every particle of tallow as soou as he is disembowelled. As they bathe in his blood and allow it to dry on their carcases, they are nob very desirable companions. The elephant whfen wounded goes on, and ou, and on for ever until he drops, hence ib is seldom any use following up the trail of any but a very badly wounded beast. When very hot they insert their trunks in their stomachs, draw up water, and sprinkle it over their backs—preferring apparently to have the moisture outside' rather than inside. The natives eat all the elephant to the bare bones if they can keep the carcase from the lions and the hyenas. They eat ib when putrid, just as greedily as when it is fresh killed. In this they resemble the lion, who will batten on a seething mass of maggoty putridity day after day, never caring in the least to kill fresh meat so long as any carrion remains. Whatever feeling of interest we may have in elephants at a distance, a herd "of wild elephants must be about as undesirable an appurtenance of an agricultural community as could be trample down plantations, wrench away the branches of trees, rout up the roots of every edible shrub with their tusks and generally rush like a great porcine avalanche of ruin across the couutry. Hence as civilisation comes the elephant must go. And go he does— nor does he.sband upon bhe order of his going. Poor wretch, he carries on his head the premium for his-own destruction. A pair of avenge tusks, weighing ;say 501b each, represents a money value of £25 each. Every elephant, therefore, may be said to carry a £50 note payable to his slaughterer, to say nothing of his value as vicTuais. — THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LION. After elejuiants, Mr Selous^has most to say abopb lions, of which he has shot over twenty.' Mr Selous has had "many adventures with the king of beasts. On one occasion he killed three full-grown lions with four shots. Lions, it seems, are easily killed.. A bullet thab would nob" break up an antelope will, do for a lion.. Per contra, their, flesh is capital eating. Lion pie is almost as good as veal pasty, and quite as white. Mr Selous is much impressed by the eye of a lion. It is, he says, of a fiery yellow of intense brilliancy. The lion measures from ten to eleven feet from nosetip to toil-tip, and weighs well on to four hundredweight. Bub instead of holding his head nobly in the air, as royalty is supposed to do, his leonine majesty always walks with his head lower than the line of his back. Sometimes he raises it to take a look at an intruder, - but, he lowers it promptly, and trots away wibh a growl. When at bay, with open month and glaring eyes, he holds his head low between his shoulders. He keeps up a continuous growl, bwitching his tail from side' : to side; and Mr Selous declares that even then he is as unpleasant-looking an animal as can be seen in a day's march. Another illusion that Mr Selous destroys is that, of the animal's mane. He asserts that the lions at the Zoo are much more nobly maued, with rare exceptions, than their wild congeners. Leisure and regular meals seem to agree with lions as well as with human beings, and the menagerie lion is for show purposes much more imposing a lion than the monarch of the African desert. THE KING OF BEASTS AND HIS WAYS. On the other hand, Mr Selous does something to vindicate the roar of the liou from the discredit heaped upon it by Livingstone. The greab missionary likened ib to the booming of an ostrich. Mr Selous says that the ostrich boom sounds as loud at fifty-yards distance as the roar of a lion at a distance of three miles. The two notes are as different as the notes of a concertina and a cathedral organ. Mr Selous says there is nothing in nature more grand and more awe-inspiring than the roaring of several lions in unison, especially if the listener, as Mr Selous was on one occasion, is not more than fifteen yards from the performers. The old lions who have worn down their teeth, are the most dangerous to human beings. With them, as with tigers, it is necessity, not choice, which leads them to diet off man. Mr Selous does not believe there are two species of African lions. The black maned and the tawny maned are both born of the same mother. They travel about sometimes in troops, sometimes in couples, and sometimes accompanied by a score of hyenas. Mr Selous says that horses or oxen that have never been mauled by a lion have no instinctive fear of the brute, but once let them experience what a lion's scratch or bite is, they ever afterwards go mad with terror. lions can get over the ground at a great pace, but they come along like a dog at a looking gallop, and can usually be overtaken oy a good horse. They kill their game in different ways. They spring upon the shoulders of buffaloes, seize their nose with one paw, and break their' neck by suddenly jerking the head backward. Horses are sometimes bitten in the throat, sometimes in the hack of the neck behind the head. They never carry off -their prey, but merely drag it along the ground, holdiug ib by the back of the neck. When eating a large animal they tear open the belly near the navel and first eat the liver, heart and lungs. If they vary this they begin by eating the hindquarters. Sometimea they bury the entrails in the earth, returning to them hereafter. Hunger is the chief source of the lion's courage. *'A hungry lion is a true devil, and fears nothing in the worM."