Later on Denys and I were accused of having shot the giraffe, a thing not allowed by the game laws. The Game Department in your shooting licence gave you the right to hunt, shoot or capture so and so many head of such and such game – I sometimes wondered by what right the Game Department dealt out such rights – and the giraffe was not included. Lions, however, you might shoot at any time, within the distance of thirty miles to a farm. But Kanuthia could bear us up in our statement that the giraffe had been dead a day or two before we came upon it.

I do not know whether the lion had actually killed the giraffe. Lions kill by breaking the necks of their victims, and in view of the height of a giraffe’s shoulders and neck the thing seems unlikely. On the other hand the strength and energy of a lion are indeed incredible things, and hunters have solemnly assured me that they have seen giraffes being killed by lions.

The squatters on my farm during the past three months had been up to the house begging me to shoot a lion ‘mbaya sana’ – very bad – which was following and worrying their herds. The lion that I met this morning and which, even on our close approach, remained on the back of his prey, absorbed in his meal and one with it, and only slightly stirring in the dim air, might well be the very same killer, the cause of so much woe over precious cows and bullocks. We were about twenty miles from the border of the farm, but a distance of twenty miles means nothing to a lion. If it were he, ought I not to shoot him when he himself gave me the chance? Denys, as Kanuthia slowed down the car, whispered to me: ‘You shoot this time.’ I had not got my own rifle with me, so he handed me his. I was never keen to shoot with his rifle, it was too heavy and in particular too long for me. But my old friend, Uncle Charles Bulpett, had told me: ‘The person who can take delight in a sweet tune without wanting to learn it, in a beautiful woman without wanting to possess her, or in a magnificent head of game without wanting to shoot it, has not got a human heart.’ So that the shot, here before daybreak, was in reality a declaration of love – and ought not then the weapon to be of the very first quality?