I wanted to climb out of the Tartarin of Tarascon class of near lion hunters into the ranks of those who are entitled to remark, "Once, when I was in Africa shooting lions," etc.

A dead lion is bogey in the big game sport--the score that every hunter dreams of achieving--and I was extremely eager to make the dream a reality.
When speaking with English sportsmen in London my first question was, "Did you get any lions ?" If they had, they at once rose in my estimation; if not, no matter how many elephants or rhinos or buffaloes they may have shot, they still remained in the amateur class.
On the steamer going down to Mombasa the hunting talk was four-fifths lion and one-fifth about other game.

The cripple who had been badly mauled by a lion was a person of much distinction, even more so than the ivory hunter who had killed three hundred elephants.
[Photograph: By courtesy of W.D.Boyce.

Mr.Stephenson's Lion] [Photograph: A Post Mortem Inquiry] On the railway to Nairobi every eye was on the lookout for lions and every one gazed with intense interest at the station of Tsavo and remembered the famous pair of man-eaters that had terrorized that place some years before.
In Nairobi the men who had killed lions, and those who had been mauled by them (and there are many of the latter), were objects of vast concern, and the little cemetery with its many headstones marked "Killed by lion" added still greater fire to my interest.
[Drawing: _The Jolly Little Cemetery_] Consequently, when we marched out of Nairobi on the evening of September twenty-third, with tents and guns and a hundred and twenty men, the dominating thought was of lions.

If ever any one had greater hope and less expectation of killing a lion I was the one.
We had planned a short trip of from three to five weeks northeast of Nairobi in what is called the Tana River country.