An Adventure With a Lioness.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 451, 5 March 1890, Page 3

An Adventure With a Lioness.

Few persons are ever mauled and carried off by a tiger or a lion, and live to tell the tale. An account of one such incident is given. It was a lioness in Northern India which played the part of assailant. The sportsmen, deserted by his natives who had the square guns, took to flight. In a moment he heard the brute come panting along close behind him. Knowing his fate was sealed, he threw himself down, and the lioness actually in her haste sprang over him. The prostrate man immediately after heard a shot from one of the natives, and a long roar told him that the brute was wounded. For a time he lay perfectly quiet, but at last he moved ever so slightly to get a glimpse of the lioness. She was licking her paw, through which a ball had evidently passed, but the moment the man stirred she grolwed savagely and sprang upon him, fixing her teeth in one of his shoulders. She then lifted him from the ground and carried him forward. Bub a previous shothad wounded herin themouth, and her jaws refused to meet; still she held the unfortunate man tightly in her teeth, with the same ease with which she wouldhave raised a kitten. After carrying him for about a hundred yards, overcome with pain, the lioness dropped her victim, and commenced licking the blood which streamed from his wounds, her rough tongue tearing open the lacerated wounds inflicted by teeth and claws. She was now alarmed by some of the servants and beaters coming up, and, seizing tlie helpless man by the left arm, she dragged him away towards the jungle. At the edge she paused, unable from pain to proceed further, and she was just on the point of completing her work, and was bending her gaping jaws towards the almost unconscious man’s throat, when she reeled and fell dead upon him. Terribly mauled, and now insensible, the man was carried to the nearest town in a palanquin. He survived for a time, bub from being a hale man became emaciated and haggard looking. After being invalided in India, he succeeded in reaching England, bub he never recovered from his last terrible experience in the jungle, and died soon afterwards.