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Lion with back injuries from fight.
If he stopped, the light would go out and he would be in darkness; if cycled on he was going
into the lion's immediate reach and fight circle. He had no option but to cycle by and
fortunately was not attacked. The lion was probably satiated from eating a cow on our
neighbor's cattle farm. As a teenager, my grandmother-in-law came across a pride of lions
walking towards her and her sister on their farm outside Barberton. Her short sighted younger
sister commented on the “nice big dogs” ahead, but she recognized them as lions, and urged her
sister to “come along dear” and they quickly climbed some trees to let the lions pass. She was
well versed with wild animals since her family and Col James Stevenson-Hamilton, the
founder warden of the Kruger Park, would visit each other and vacation together either in the
Kruger Park or Mozambique. Indeed, the story in Stevenson-Hamilton's topic of a snake in a
granadilla vine biting a tennis player reaching for a ball stuck in the vine growing on the fence
around the tennis court was her father.
Her father was an insurance assessor for Lloyds of London covering the Mozambique coast
for ships damaged and shipwrecks in the area. On one occasion he and a companion traveled
up the coast to check on a wreck and imposed on some local Africans to borrow a hut for the
night in an area with man-eating lions. The local Africans warned them they had to be into the
hut before sundown, but the thought of getting into the smoke filled hut that early was not
inviting so they stayed outside and ambled around the deserted village's neatly swept earthen
grounds. All of a sudden the man-eating lion showed up. The nearby hut doors were tightly
sealed by the internal fearful Africans. Seeking escape, they scrambled up on the top of a hut's
thatched roof and held onto the center tree post for dear life. As the lion circled around them,
they clung to the opposite side of the center tree post and this continued for the whole night till
dawn. It is of interest that the Swazi and Shangaan huts are made with fairly sturdy branch and
mud clay mortar walls, capped with thatched roofs, and typically with a central tree trunk post
and a good sturdy door whereas the Zulu huts were traditionally made with a purely thatched
hut over branches and with an open entrance. I have never read an explanation for this but it
does make one wonder if it was related to man-eating lions that were present among the
Shangaan and Swazis but had been eliminated from among the warlike Zulus.
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