His work as a regimental officer will be more fully dealt with in a later chapter.

CHAPTER VI

HUNTER

“The longest march seems short,” says Baden-Powell, “when one is hunting game.”  Many a time, when he has been marching either alone or with troops, his clothes in tatters, his shoes soleless, and his mouth as dry as a saucer licked by a cat, many and many a time has he got out from under the impending shadow of depression, out into the open sunlight with his rifle,—­to forget all about hunger and thirst in matching his wits against nature’s.  This kind of wild sport has an absorbing interest for Baden-Powell.  What he would say if invited to hunt a tame deer, lifted by human arms out of a cart, kicked away from playing with the hounds and pushed and beaten into an astonished and bewildered gallop, neither you nor I must pretend to know; but for that kind of “sport” it is very certain he would express no such enthusiasm as he does for the keen, wild, dangerous sport of the legitimate hunter.  He will not seek the destruction of any quarry that is not worthy of his steel; he likes to go against that quarry where there are obstacles and dangers for him, and opportunities of escape for the creature he pursues.  He is a sportsman, not a butcher; mole-catching never stirred the blood in his veins.

And while he is hunting animals he is educating himself as a scout.  His whole attention becomes riveted on the game he is pursuing; he studies the spoor, takes account of the nature of the country, and makes a note in his mind of any observations likely to be of service during a campaign in that kind of country.  It is not the work of destruction itself that makes Baden-Powell a keen sportsman.

In the midst of the Matabele war, just as the weary, half-starved horses which had carried his men eighty-seven miles drew near the stronghold of Wedza, Baden-Powell was exhilarated by a meeting with a lion.  In his diary against that date he wrote:  “To be marked with a red mark when I can get a red pencil.”  The incident is well related in his diary and is a characteristic of B.-P.  It runs:  “Jackson and a native boy accompanied me scouting this morning; we three started off at three in the morning, so that by dawn we were in sight of one of the hills we expected might be occupied by Paget, and where we hoped to see his fires.  We saw none there; but on our way, in moving round the hill which overlooks our camp, we saw a match struck high up near the top of the mountain.  This one little spark told us a great deal.  It showed that the enemy were there; that they were awake and alert (I say ‘they,’ because one nigger would not be up there by himself in the dark); and that they were aware of our force being at Possett’s (as, otherwise, they would not be occupying that hill).  However, they could not see anything of us, as it was then quite dark; and we went farther on among the mountains.  In