My mother found this story, an excerpt really, in The Greatest Dog Stories Ever Told edited by Patricia M. Sherwood. Beryl Markham’s courage never fails to amaze me; it stands hand in hand with her ability to write.
In this story, she tells of her dog, Buller. He was bull terrier and English sheepdog, so thoroughly mixed he looked like neither.
Buller was my accomplice in everything. He was a past-master at stealth and at more other things than any dog I ever owned or knew.
Surely he was at least as brave as Beryl, accompanying her on the Nandi hunts she participated in with the Murani in East Africa. He had even survived the attack of a leopard who had crept one night into Beryl’s hut and abducted him from the foot of her bed.
This story of their hunt, in which Beryl and Buller and the Murani encounter an angry lion, and an angrier warthog, shows more courage than I will ever possess.
But, it also shows the affection for a dog, which I know quite well.
Dolce Bellezza 