by one of the lions after arriving at the Tsavo train depot in the evening. However, his assistant, Abdullah, was killed while Whitehead escaped with four claw lacerations running down his back. Hunting the lions Eventually other officials arrived, with a reinforcement of around twenty armed Sepoys to assist in the hunt. Patterson set traps and tried several times to ambush the lions at night from a tree. After repeated unsuccessful attempts, he shot the first lion on 9 December 1898. Twenty days later, the second lion was found and killed. The first lion killed measured from nose to tip of tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp. Patterson wrote in his account that he wounded the first lion with one bullet from a high-calibre rifle. This shot struck the lion in its hind leg, but it escaped. Later, it returned at night and began stalking Patterson as he tried to hunt it. He shot it through the shoulder, penetrating its heart with a more powerful rifle and found it lying dead the next morning not far from his platform. The second lion was shot nine times, five with the same rifle, three with a second, and once with a third rifle – six finding their mark. The first shot was fired from atop a scaffolding that Patterson had built near a goat killed by the lion. Two shots from a second rifle hit the lion eleven days later as it was stalking Patterson and trying to flee. When they found the lion the next day, Patterson shot it three more times with the same rifle, severely crippling it, and he shot it three times with a third rifle, twice in the chest, and once in the head, which killed it. He claimed it died gnawing on a fallen tree branch, still trying to reach him. Works resume The construction crew returned and finished the bridge in February 1899. The exact number of people killed by the lions is unclear. Patterson gave several figures, overall claiming that there were 135 victims. At the end of the crisis, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Lord Salisbury, addressed the House of Lords on the subject of the Tsavo man-eaters: Museum display After 25 years as Patterson's floor rugs, the lions' skins were sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in 1924 for a sum of