Henry Feller, just coming of age as the Twentieth Century began, found himself, by the luck of the draw, at the epicenter of his country's new role as a reluctant world power. From the rebellions in the Philippines and China to the Roosevelt Safari in Africa, Henry was in the middle of the action. What he saw, he wrote about. Men of action like Dan Daly, Fred Funston and young Lt. Doug MacArthur, former President Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit, legendary white hunter Fred Selous, Quaker engineer Bert Hoover and his geologist wife, Lou. And Emma Fontaine. And of course there was the erotic Tamanti. In combination, they offered all a young man could ask for.
H.J. Popowski has been a writer, editor and managing editor for nearly thirty years. His stories, monographs and articles have appeared in the United States, England and Japan. He is presently completing the second volume of the story of Henry Feller's life and loves.
Everything went exactly the way Selous said it would—having done this same sort of thing some hundreds of times all over the African continent. Except for the very last bit. They rode over to the village, and one of the village men guided them to the trail through the scrub thorn that the women had been walking along when the attack happened. They were nearly to the bank of the stream. By Henry’s way of thinking, “stream” was an exaggeration at this time of the year. The bed was a series of muddy puddles separated by large rocks at the bottom of a wide depression. It brought to mind images of some of the runs feeding the Little Missouri in the Dakota Badlands on the Lazy S Ranch. In any case, they ran across the lion spoor within yards of the bank. Everyone loaded and Selous began to ride point with Williams on one flank and Judd on the other. Henry rode chaser. They hadn’t walked their horses more than twenty yards into the thorn bushes when they heard the lions’ cough. The sound was nothing like Henry expected to hear, but it nevertheless made his neck hairs stand at attention and made sweat bead on the back of his hands. He was gripping the reins with his teeth and holding the Winchester with the muzzle pointing roughly away from Judd, who was the closest to him.
Suddenly, there were three large flashes of grayish-yellow bursting from the cover of the thorns. The largest lioness emerged ahead of Selous and ran at full speed toward another patch of scrub thorn about a quarter of a mile away. The second cat crossed in front of Williams on a diverging course. The third followed the first, keeping a hundred yards or so behind Selous, who was now galloping after the first lion. Judd immediately spurred his horse after the third cat, while Henry counted to three before following. In less than thirty seconds Selous had fired both barrels of his double rifle, and the first lioness tumbled head over tail into a dust ball. Williams was out of sight in the thorn. Judd was riding hell for leather after Selous, trying to stay in sight of the third lion now running in Selous’ dust cloud. A puff of wind scudded the dust to one side of Henry, now a good three hundred yards behind Judd. In the clear air, Henry could see that the third lion had gone to ground in the dust and was pressed flat on the ground, its ears laid back on its neck as Judd rode past. In a half heartbeat the lion was back up and heading for Judd’s blind quarter. Henry was too far away to hope to yell and be heard. Jerking his head and grabbing the reins with one hand, Henry managed a full crash stop, which would have worked perfectly if his horse had only been a cowpony. Unfortunately, Henry’s horse had no idea what it was supposed to do. The result was that when Henry attempted a leg-over off-side dismount—the sort of thing you would do to hog-tie a calf for branding—he succeeded instead to manage a perfect five-point landing: two knees, two elbows and a forehead. Fortunately, he managed to keep one hand wrapped securely around the Winchester, because when he managed to come semi-erect onto his knees, he had time to snap one shot at the lioness, who was just beginning to leap toward Judd.
Either Henry’s shot, or his horse’s sense, or his own sense of survival—something—caused Judd to look back over his shoulder just as the lioness jumped. Judd’s double rifle fired both barrels, which made his horse lurch sideways, spilling Judd unceremoniously in a dusty heap on the ground, unarmed, and about ten <