On the night that King George VI died, and Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth, she and the Duke of Edinburgh were visiting Kenya. They had traveled to Nyeri, and from there to the famous Treetops, where they were engaged in game-watching. Their guide and guardian was Jim Corbett, already worldfamous as an author and hunter of maneaters.
Corbett was then 77 years old. That night, while the Princess slept in the glorified treehouse, Corbett sat up on the balcony, his rifle across his knees, while a leopard played with the access rope that dangled to the ground and was used for hoisting up supplies. It fell to Corbett in the morning to awake Her (now) Majesty and tell her the news of her father.
Later, in his last book, Treetops, he wrote that “for the first time in the history of the
