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I can only recount my experience with a leopard.

Seated in a blind, late in the afternoon, eighty yards from a bait in a tree which a leopard had visited the night before. Krieghoff .375 protruding through the shooting hole, my white face turned away from the hole, the two gun bearers, Kaoli and Keribai sitting opposite the hole, observing the bait.

Suddenly a whispered word, "Chui!" I turn from where I had been sitting and peer cautiously out the hole. I can see something on the branch above the bait, shining bright gold in the light of the setting sun. I look through the scope. A big leopard is lying along the limb, reaching down with his left foreleg for the bait.

"Doumi?" I whisper (Is it a male?). "Ndio" (yes) is the reply. "Piga" (shoot).

I line up the shot. I am thinking, "This is the most important shot I have ever tried. If I wound this animal, it will fall into the thick brush directly under it, and we wil have to go in after it. Me with my DR and the two gun bearers with their shotguns and buckshot. Leopards are indescriminate, they wil attack anybody when wounded. Unlike a lion, they will not concentrate on one person and allow the others to dispatch it from a safe distance. A leopard will give everyone a piece of the action, and what they like to do most is grab a man by the shoulders with their fore paws and rake his midsection with their hind paws. I can't miss and be responsible for getting these two brave men injured or killed."

I aim directly between the shoulder blades. The shot breaks. The 300 grain bullet flies toward its target. Nothing happens. NOTHING HAPPENS !!

I have shot cats before. As a quail hunter, I had been taught that a stray cat more than 100 yards away from home was more than fair game, it needed to be shot. Cats I had shot in the past had jumped straight in the air, yowled, screamed, run in circles before dying. They seemed particularly tenuous of life. This one did nothing. I had shot at the only deaf leopard in East Africa and missed.

I reached for the second trigger. The shot breaks. Nothing.

From behind me comes, "Bas, piga, kufa." (Enough, you hit it, it's dead.)

We cautiously leave the blind and head toward the tree. Suddenly the leopard's hindquarters slide off the limb and he remains hanging, draped over a branch. While we are standing there, the Land Cruiser arrives, bringing the PH and the tracker, who had heard the shots.

Up the tree goes the tracker and down comes the leopard. The two shots are less than an inch apart, both breaking the vertibrae. The cat was stone dead after the first shot and had not moved a muscle.

Vast relief.

Dangerous unwounded? Probably not. Wounded, definately!

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