He had got my wind and was facing me with tail nervously erect.

The tail of a rhino is an infallible barometer of his state of mind.

With his short sight, I knew that he could not see me at that distance, but I knew that he had detected the direction in which the danger lay.

By slowly moving ahead, the distance was cut to about seventy yards, which was not too far away in an open country with a wounded rhino in the foreground.

I resolved to shoot before he charged or before he ran away, and so I prepared to end the long chase with an unerring shot.
Suddenly a sound struck my ear that acted upon me like an electric shock: "_Simba!_" It was the one word that I had been hoping to hear ever since leaving Nairobi, for the word means "lion." My Somali gunbearer was eagerly pointing toward a lone tree that stood a hundred yards off to the left.
A huge, hulking animal was slowly moving away from it.