A Lion Hunter's Dreams

In the Kruger National Park, or Transvaal Game Reserve, where the African animals, amongst which thousands of lions are kept in their wild state, there is a ranger called Wolhuter. He is the hero of a drama which having taken place years ago, in August 1903, has since been retold many a time and has made him famous all over South Africa. This is how Lieutenant Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton, the warder and founder of Kruger National Park, relates Wolhuter's accident in his book, South African Eden.1

'One day, Wolhuter, in the course of his return home from the Olifants River, having broken up his camp at the Ngwanetsi, set out to march to a place called Metsimetsi, where he intended to sleep at the permanent picket established there. He was accompanied by several Native police and some pack donkeys, but the pace of this form of transport being a slow one, and the afternoon already well advanced, he rode on ahead, accompanied only by his dog. While still some eight miles from his destination, the sun went down, the short twilight soon passed, and in the bed of a small dry water course, which he found himself presently crossing, it was nearly dark. Suddenly, the dog barked, and he saw an animal which, from its dimly discerned colors, he took to be a reedbuck, apparently approaching him from his right front. He was just thinking this rather an unusual proceeding on the part of an antelope, when he all at once realized that the animal was, in fact, a lion, and that it was coming straight at him. He pulled his horse sharply to the left, by which action he evaded the full force of the rush, but the assailant's claws caught the horse's quarters, and, as the latter bounded forward, Wolhuter, unseated,