The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: lion as an express bullet. The lion is soft, and not a difficult animal
to finish if you hit him anywhere in the body. A buck takes far more
killing.
"Well, I started, and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to
discover whereabouts the brutes lay up for the day. About three hundred
yards from the waggon was the crest of a rise covered with single mimosa
trees, dotted about in a park-like fashion, and beyond this lay a
stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan, or water-hole, which
covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed with reeds, now
in the sere and yellow leaf. From the further edge of this pan the
ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut
 Long Odds |