Long after the diamonds and the lost kingdoms, the old elephant hunter Allan Quatermain settles by an English fire among friends, lights his pipe, and is drawn out, once again, into telling what happened to him long ago and far away. This collection gathers four of H. Rider Haggard's shorter Quatermain tales — the hunting yarn in its purest form, told in the dry, modest, self-deprecating voice that was Haggard's greatest invention. In Hunter Quatermain's Story, pressed for the truth about his famous diamonds, the hunter offers instead a grimmer memory — a wagon burned, a trek through fever country, a black-maned lion in the moonlight, and a friend to be avenged. Long Odds tells of the vast lion whose skull hangs above his mantel, and the long, dangerous rivalry that put it there. A Tale of Three Lions brings in Quatermain's own son and a debt owed to a murdered servant boy, settled at last by a hidden pool. And Magepa the Buck leaves the hunting field behind for the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, giving its whole heart to an old Zulu and a race run for life against the king's soldiers. Read together, the four range across the full span of Quatermain's world — sport and danger, grief and devotion, the comedy of the fireside and the tragedy of the field — and make an ideal companion to the novels, filling in the hunter's long life with the smaller, sharper memories the big books had no room for. Published across some forty years, these are also documents of the Victorian and Edwardian empire, carrying the colonial gaze and racial attitudes of their age — read here for the swift, expert adventure they have always been, and seen clearly for what they were.
