BABY GIRL TARZAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 January 1922, Page 8

BABY GIRL TARZAN.

A family secret for many years, how Mrs. Magdalene McCabe, as a child, was suckled by a lionet, has been revealed by her husband, upon her recent death at Johannesburg. Mrs. McCabe, the daughter of Mr. F. Swart, who spent his time with his wife hunting in the wilder parts of South Africa, was born during a trek through Coles berg. Mr. McCabe says that one morning, near the Crocodile River, Magdalene, who was three, was told to go down to the water where her mother was washing. Five “minutes later the girl had disappeared. After the distracted parents had searched eight days for her, two wizened bushmen walked into the camp and said to Mr. Swart, “White man, bring guns. We have found your child.”

The bush men took Mr. Swart along the river’s banks for about three miles, and then they pointed out a tiny figure being suckled with two liop. cubs by a lioness. The hunter fired a shot in the air, and the lions fled, leaving the little girl, her clothes torn and her body badly scratched, but otherwise unharmed.

When Magdalene was ten she was found by her father near the Limpopo River flinging pebbles at two lions on the opposite bank. She said to her father, “There are the big dogs that carried me across the river.”