"As I stood looking at the buffalo, Minyama, one of my Kafirs, threw an assegai at it from behind me, which, grazing its side, just stuck in the skin on the inside of its thigh. Without more ado, the ugly-looking old beast jumped up and came trotting out, with head up and nose extended, evidently looking for the disturbers of its peace, and as Minyama was hiding behind the trunk of a large tree, and the rest of the Kafirs had made themselves scarce, it at once came straight at me, grunting furiously. I was standing close to a very small tree, not more than six inches in diameter, but as I was unarmed, and to run would have been useless, I swarmed up it with marvellous celerity. The buffalo just came up and looked at me, holding his nose close to my feet, and grunting all the time. He then turned and went off at a lumbering canter, and I then, for the first time, saw that he had been terribly torn and scratched on the hind-quarters and shoulders by lions. Had he tried to knock my little sapling down, he might, I think, easily have accomplished it; as it was, my legs being bare, and the bark of the tree very rough, I had rubbed a lot of skin off the insides of my knees and the calves of my legs."[19] Buffaloes, if the ground is hard, can go at a great pace and can outrun a horse for some distance. It once took me a chase of five miles before I got up with a big bull on whose head I had set my desires. "In 1873," writes Selous, "a buffalo cow, although severely wounded, ran down in the open a horse Lobengula had lent me, and on which my Hottentot driver was mounted; she struck the horse as it was going at full speed between the thighs with her nose, and, luckily striking short, knocked it over on one side and sent its rider flying, but before she could do further damage a bullet through her shoulders from George Wood incapacitated her for further mischief."