On May 20th, a lion attempted to steal a cook’s wife from the small African town of Tabora.
Eyewitness, Roald Dahl, reports that the lion abducted the woman in the evening and then walked away in the ‘calmest possible manner’. Dahl, along with the woman’s husband and a District Officer, chased the lion as it headed for the jungle. Dahl describes the District Officer shooting past the cook into the air in front of the lion. The creature, startled, dropped the woman and subsequently fled into the cover of the jungle.
Dahl says that the woman was unharmed, ‘sitting up and smiling’. The woman believes that she survived due to pretending to be dead and that this also caused the lion to not even bite through her clothes.
Robert Sanford, District Officer, discussed his thoughts on the incident with Mr Dahl. Sanford doubts the lion was hunting as food is plentiful on the plains. The possibility of the lion protecting cubs is also unlikely as it would have killed the woman on the spot. Mr Sanford told Dahl that nothing like this had happened before and that he did not think the lion meant to harm the woman.
Residents were advised to stay inside overnight. However, the town does not plan to hunt down the lion due to the incident being so unique and the woman being unharmed.
The motives behind the attempted abduction and the lion’s strange behaviour remain a mystery.