When I first came out to Africa I could not live without getting a fine specimen of each single kind of African game. In my last ten years out there I did not fire a shot except in order to get meat for my Natives. It became to me an unreasonable thing, indeed in itself ugly or vulgar, for the sake of a few hours’ excitement to put out a life that belonged in the great landscape and had grown up in it for ten or twenty, or – as in the case of buffaloes and elephants – for fifty or a hundred years. But lion-hunting was irresistible to me; I shot my last lion a short time before I left Africa.

As now on this New Year’s morning as noiselessly as possible I got down from the car and, through the long wet grass that washed my hands, the rifle, and my face, slowly walked closer to the lion, he stirred, rose and stood up immovable, his shoulder towards me, as fine a target for a shot as in the course of a lifetime you would get anywhere in the world. The sun by now was just below the horizon, the morning sky behind the dark silhouette was clear like liquid gold. I was struck by a thought: ‘I have seen you before, I know you well. But from where?’ The answer came at once: ‘It is a lion out of the royal coat of arms of Denmark, one of our three dark-blue lions on gold ground. Lion posant or it is called in the heraldic language – he knows it himself.’ As I sat down on the ground, got Denys’ rifle into position on my knee and took aim, I made a resolution: ‘If I get this lion, the King of Denmark is to have the skin.’

As the shot fell, booming loudly in the still morning landscape and echoing from the hills, it looked to me as if the lion was carried a couple of feet straight upwards into the air before he came down and collapsed. He had been hit in the heart, it was as it should be.