LION-HUNTING EXPERIENCES

F. T. Colby '05, F.R.G.S., and J. T. Coolidge, 3rd, '11 gave an excellent stere-opticon lecture on "Hunting and Photography in East Equatorial Africa" in the Union last evening.

Coolidge described his journey into East Africa via Nairobi to Kijabe, where he set out across a waterless desert with a train of bullock wagons to the Wandorobo river. This was the only method of crossing this stretch, for the bullocks were able to travel several days without water. Among the game he shot and photographed were lions, leopards, bush cats, cheetahs, ostriches, and rhinos.

After a month spent along the Wandorobo, Coolidge was joined by Colby, and they started for Mt. Suswa to shoot lions. One night after the latter had obtained several fine specimens, a stockade was built and a dead antelope placed nearby as a decoy. On this carcass Coolidge arranged a camera with a string attached to the shutter and then waited inside the stockade. He had taken two splendid flashlight pictures of lionesses and was rearranging the camera when a large lion charged him. He ran and dove through the door of the enclosure. Next morning the lion's tracks were discovered only four feet from the entrance.

Shortly after this episode Coolidge returned to Mombasa and thence to America.

Colby then told of his expedition to Mt. Kenia in search of elephants. He described the customs and characteristics of the Mweru, Masai, Kikuyu, and other tribes through which he traveled. On several occasions, too, he was obliged to settle tribal dissensions among his own train.

He had several narrow escapes form infuriated elephants and rhinos, once stopping a charging elephant only ten feet off. Buffaloes, also, were very dangerous. Lion hunting, though Colby said, is the finest sport of all, for the hunter is pitted against another trained hunter who knows much more about it than he does. Lions are crafty, and often seem cowardly, for they know that their charge is dangerous only within 40 yards. Once started, however, nothing but instant death can stop them.

The lecture was illustrated by stereopticon pictures, made from flash-light snap-shots of wild animals taken at night by a camera of Coolidge's own invention.