In 1902 a lion dragged Harry Wolhuter into the dark.
He is the only man known to have killed a lion with a knife - and sixty years later, he told the story himself.
He was riding home from a long patrol in the Sabi Game Reserve, ahead of his party, on a path he had ridden a hundred times. Two shapes came up out of the grass. He thought they were reedbuck. They were lions.
The first knocked him from the saddle. The second took him by the right shoulder and began dragging him backwards towards a dry stream bed, and Harry Wolhuter stayed conscious the whole way - long enough to wonder, with an oddly practical calm, whether the lion meant to kill him first or eat him alive.
His rifle was gone with the horse. His men were miles behind. What he had, if the sheath had held, was a knife.
This is his own voice telling it. A recording made more than sixty years ago, never broadcast, never published, lost for decades and surfaced only recently. An old man in a quiet room, remembering a night more than a hundred and twenty years before - the dark, the grass, the weight of the animal, and the young nurse who later broke the rules to save his arm when two doctors had given up.
You can still go and check. The knife is in the Stevenson-Hamilton Museum at Skukuza, small enough to make you stare. The lion's skin lies beside it. Out on the Lindanda path a line of stones paces out the hundred metres he was dragged, and the tree he was pulled beneath - dead these many years - still stands, set upright in concrete, because nobody in the Kruger has ever quite had the heart to let it fall.
A production from Solid Gold featuring the beautiful voice of Malcolm Gooding. Solid Gold Podcasts and Audiobooks Website
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