— od ———— THEODORE ROOSEVELT a Fe pe Presented to the LIBRARY of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO by DR. A. W. CONN AFRICAN GAME TRAILS BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS AFRICAN GAME TRAILS. An account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist. Illustrated. Large 8vo .... . . $4.00 net OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER. New Edition. Illustrated. 8vo . . . $3.00 net OLIVER CROMWELL. Illustrated. 8vo . . $2.00 THE ROUGH RIDERS. Illustrated. 8vo . . $1.50 THE ROOSEVELT BOOK. Selections from the Writ- ings of Theodore Roosevelt. 16mo . 50 cents net THE ELKHORN EDITION. Complete Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 25 volumes. Illustrated. 8vo. Sold by subscription. AFRICAN GAME TRAILS AN ACCOUNT OF THE AFRICAN WANDERINGS OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER-NATURALIST BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS IgQIo CoryrIGHT, 1909, 1910, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. TO KERMIT ROOSEVELT MY SIDE-PARTNER IN OUR “GREAT ADVENTURE” KORED I on SFL AR - a eer oles thir aR acrY 8 ‘ Wive joy 4 i al “eee \ gt ny sire j uj & lords of the w der i the Cun Bac wary, . 5 fad rv¥i,. 5 tht a Ln | al hese grew jeheter mare maourifain di eh wMrorial st: SAG rc 4 pple: ane ete) K- mes that bari ; | i } | pe } . f ‘2 ; j ' U shroude a ~ and slg nt wi goae® pet : re reo epirld ioe EM and. adi Pais stuc1 o th iotrded of ei ua ph Glviy aS ihes i ue his hundreds of: wou: 3 he: - - 43 ¢ Suh hy eee i rks > ie f ~ ' th wes = g ie eh lO “. % i... his crops and i ‘tattle, t foes before vide he birmsc if ae 40 — C3 & ? Lag j \ Ibert Edward Nyanza Oe | ae ~~. nae (SASS >) rhEQ WS ait wallza IAIN TS T SCALE OF MILES 50 100 150 200 } L'bugota (¢ f 2. Ugasd Matron | h. Vr, a. ™, 2&5 G of: Qi N E A Ss < A R L.L.POATES ENG, CO., N.Y, | Longitude East 35 from siadennemiieanmel Map showing Mr. Roosevelt’s route and hunting trips in Africa FOREWORD “T speak of Africa and golden joys”; the joy of wan- dering through lonely lands; the joy of hunting the mighty and terrible lords of the wilderness, the cunning, the wary, and the grim. In these greatest of the world’s great hunting-grounds there are mountain peaks whose snows are dazzling under the equatorial sun; swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in the steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts where the iron desolation is shrouded from view by the wavering mockery of the mirage; vast grassy plains where palms and thorn-trees fringe the dwindling streams; mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths. There are regions as healthy as the northland; and other regions, radiant with bright-hued flowers, birds and butter- flies, odorous with sweet and heavy scents, but, treacherous in their beauty, and sinister to human life. On the land and in the water there are dread brutes that feed on the flesh of man; and among the lower things, that crawl, and fly, and sting, and bite, he finds swarming foes far more evil and deadly than any beast or reptile; foes that kill his crops and his cattle, foes before which he himself per- ishes in his hundreds of thousands. vii viii FOREWORD The dark-skinned races that live in the land vary widely. Some are warlike, cattle-owning nomads; some till the soil and live in thatched huts shaped like beehives; some are fisherfolk; some are ape-like naked savages, who dwell in the woods and prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves. The land teems. with beasts of the chase, infinite in num- ber and incredible in variety. It holds the fiercest beasts of ravin, and the fleetest and most timid of those beings that live in undying fear of talon and fang. It holds the largest and the smallest of hoofed animals. It holds the mightiest creatures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies of the rocks, and in the tree tops. There are antelope smaller than hares, and antelope larger than oxen. There are creatures which are the embodiments of grace; and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful ani- mals whose like is not known elsewhere; and with others even stranger that show both in form and temper something of the fantastic and the grotesque. It is a never-ending pleasure to gaze at the great herds of buck as they move to and fro in their myriads; as they stand for their noontide rest in the quivering heat haze; as the long files come down to drink at the watering-places; as they feed and fight and rest and make love. The hunter who wanders through these lands sees sights which ever afterward remain fixed in his mind. He sees the monstrous river-horse snorting and plunging beside the boat; the giraffe looking over the tree tops at the nearing FOREWORD ix horseman; the ostrich fleeing at a speed that none may rival; the snarling leopard and coiled python, with their lethal beauty; the zebras, barking in the moonlight, as the laden caravan passes on its night march through a thirsty land. In after years there shall come to him memories of the lion’s charge; of the gray bulk of the elephant, close at hand in the sombre woodland; of the buffalo, his sullen eyes lowering from under his helmet of horn; of the rhinoceros, truculent and stupid, standing in the bright sunlight on the empty plain. These things can be told. But there are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. There is de- light in the hardy life of the open, in long rides rifle in hand, in the thrill of the fight with dangerous game. Apart from this, yet mingled with it, is the strong attraction of the silent places, of the large tropic moons, and the splendor of the new stars; where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sun- rise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting. THEODORE ROOSEVELT. Kaartoum, March 15, 1910. CONTENTS CHAPTER I A RaritroaD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE . CHAPTER II On an East AFRICAN RANCH . CHAPTER III Lion HuntTING ON THE Kapiti PLaIns. CHAPTER IV On SaFari. RHINO AND GIRAFFE CHAPTER V Juya Farm; Hippo anp Leoparp CHAPTER VI A BurraLo-Hunt By THE KamirTI CHAPTER VII TREKKING THROUGH THE THIRST TO THE SOTIK . CHAPTER VIII HUNTING IN THE SOTIK . xi PAGE 30 82 . 106 ieee . 146 Pe yb xii CONTENTS CHAPTER IX EO ARE URIVAGHA Qh 8 ao ly CHAPTER X ELepHant Huntinc on Mount KENIA CHAPTER XI Tue Guaso Nyrero; A RIVER OF THE EQUATORIAL DESERT . CHAPTER XII To THE Uasin GiIsHuU CHAPTER XIII UGANDA, AND THE GREAT Nyanza LAKEs CHAPTER XIV THe GREAT RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO CHAPTER XV Down THE Nite; THe Giant Evanp . AppENDIxX A [PERSONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS] . _ Appenpix B [Lists or Mammats; HELiER’s Notes] AppeNnpDIx C [Lorinc’s Notes] . Appenpix D [Brotocicat Survey or Mount Kenta] AppenDix E [Protective CoLoraTION IN ANIMALS]. Appenpix F [Tue Picsxin Liprary]. | INDEX PAGE - 198 a6 . 269 - 320 - 369 = me - 438 - 471 - 472 . 483 . 489 . 491 ; Bee - 5a ILLUSTRATIONS Mr. Roosevelt and one of his big lions . . . . . « « Frontispiece Photogravure from a photograph by Kermit Rasaaees FACING PAGE Map showing Mr. Roosevelt’s route and hunting trips in Africa A herd of zebra and hartebeest . One of the interesting features of African wild life i is the diss association and companionship so often seen between two totally different species of game. Before he could get quite all the way round in his ee rush to reach us, I struck him with my left-hand barrel . ‘ . Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. Without any warning, out he came and charged straight at Kermit, who stopped him when he was but six yards off Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. Mr. Roosevelt and Kermit Roosevelt with the first buffalo . It was not a nice country in which to be charged by the herd, and for a moment things trembled in the balance . Pera * Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. Group—Waxbills. Courser. Elephant shrew. Springhaas. Dikdik. Serval kitten. Banded mongoose. Colobus monkey . The safari fording a stream Giraffe at home Group—A rhino family. Rhino surveying the safari. ‘In the middle of the African plain, deep in prehistoric thought” aa Wildebeest at home . Two bulls may suddenly ‘hee ‘ their acai ia for a moment or two fight furiously. Group—The wounded lioness ready to charge. The wounded lioness . He came on steadily, ears laid back and uttering terrific coughing grunts . Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. xiii vii 28 Q2 116 142 156 166 172 174 180 190 194 XiV ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Group—What one has to shoot at when after rere on water. Mr. Roosevelt’s hippo charging open-mouthed . ya Charged straight for the boat, with open jaws, bent on mischief . Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. Group—Black-backed jackal. Tree hyrax. Big gazelle buck. Pelican. Spotted genet. White-tailed mongoose. Porcupine. Baboon Towing in bull hippo, Lake Naivasha. Kikuyu Ngama, Neri Group—Camping after death of first bull. The porters exult over the death of the bull eae May bie cr eget Falls on slope of Kenia near first elephant camp The charging bull elephant “He could have touched me with his clade ” Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. The first bull elephant . A herd of elephant in an open forest of high timber Group—The herd a 2 aig The same herd on the eve of charging f SERN ar bie DENY Ny oti > Mr. Roosevelt’s and Kermit’s camp near which they got the rhino and elephant we iilithe Ta ta RRP orang My boma where I camped alone Group—An oryx bull. An oryx cow . Group—The Guaso Nyero. - Ivory-nut palms on the Guaso Nyero . Group—The old bull Athi giraffe. The reticulated giraffe Group—Black-and-white crow. Sparrow-lark. Ant wheatear. Ostrich nest. Rusty rock-rat. Sand-rat. African hedgehog. ‘‘Mole-rat” Juma Yohari with the nes killed by Kermit Roosevelt at Lake Hannington . Reinet at: The broken horn of sincehne! ram Pe indpeaded 4 in 1 Oe buck’s faa Tarlton and singsing shot by Mr. Roosevelt The hyena which was swollen with elephant meat had gotten inside the huge body a Pika ees a E 212 216 220 224 234 244 248 252 256 258 260 266 272 274 280 300 316 322 342 35° ILLUSTRATIONS Mr. Roosevelt and Kermit Roosevelt with giant eland horns XV FACING PAGE Rearing, the lion struck the man, bearing down the shield 356 Photogravure from a drawing by Philip R. Goodwin. Group—The spears that did the trick. Mr. Roosevelt ness the speared lion ‘ 358 Group—The lion as it fell. As he fell he gripped a spear head in his jaws with such tremendous force that he bent it double . : 360 Sailinye, the Dorobo, who was with Kermit Roosevelt when he shot the bongo, holding up the bongo head 364 Dance of boys of the One tribe in honor of the chief’s son who had just died . ; pita " 368 The situtunga shot by Kermit Roosevelt at Kampalla . . ~ 380 Group—Crocodile. Nile bushbuck. Cobus maria. Baker’s roan. Ground horn-bill. Wagtail. Nightjar. Fish eagle . 398 The “white” rhino . 400 Photogravure from a Gewing na Philip R. Cacdulbi. The papyrus afire 406 We walked up to within about twenty yards . 414 The cow and calf square-nosed rhino under the tree after aig dis- turbed by the click of the camera ; 420 Group—The calf which was old enough to shift for itself refused to leave the body. When alarmed they failed to make out where the danger lay. i ren ee ere Saree ic Ra ' One remained standing but the other “iigurtma sat down open its haunches like a dog ite’ “er og ; - . 428 The monitor lizard robbing a crocodile’s nest . 432 Group—Kermit’s first giant eland am shot on the + Pee va Giant eland bull : ; 450 452 He loved the great game as if he were their father. —Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Tell me the course, the voyage, the ports and the new stars. —Bliss Carman. AFRICAN GAME TRAILS CHAPTER I A RAILROAD THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE THE great world movement which began with the voy- ages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and which has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity and complexity until our own time, has developed along a myriad lines of interest. In no way has it been more interesting than in the way in which it has brought into sudden, violent, and intimate contact phases of the world’s life history which would normally be separated by untold centuries of slow development. Again and again, in the continents new to peoples of European stock, we have seen the spectacle of a high civilization all at once thrust into and superimposed upon a wilderness of savage men and savage beasts. Nowhere, and at no time, has the contrast been more strange and more striking than in British East Africa during the last dozen years. The country lies directly under the equator; and the hinterland, due west, contains the huge Nyanza lakes, vast inland seas which gather the head-waters of the White Nile. This hinterland, with its lakes and its marshes, its snow- capped mountains, its high, dry plateaus, and its forests of deadly luxuriance, was utterly unknown to white men half a century ago. The map of Ptolemy in the second cen- tury of our era gave a more accurate view of the lakes, mountains, and head-waters of the Nile than the maps pub- lished at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth 1 2 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS century, just before Speke, Grant, and Baker made their great trips of exploration and adventure. Behind these explorers came others; and then adventurous missionaries, traders, and elephant hunters; and many men, whom risk did not daunt, who feared neither danger nor hardship, traversed the country hither and thither, now for one rea- son, now for another, now as naturalists, now as geog- raphers, and again as government officials or as mere wanderers who loved the wild and strange life which had survived over from an elder age. Most of the tribes were of pure savages; but here and there were intrusive races of higher type; and in Uganda, beyond the Victoria Nyanza, and on the head-waters of the Nile proper, lived a people which had advanced to the upper stages of barbarism, which might almost be said to have developed a very primitive kind of semi-civilization. Over this people—for its good fortune—Great Britain estab- lished a protectorate; and ultimately, in order to get easy access to this new outpost of civilization in the heart of the Dark Continent, the British Government built a railroad from the old Arab coast town of Mombasa westward to Victoria Nyanza. This railroad, the embodiment of the eager, masterful, materialistic civilization of to-day, was pushed through a region in which nature, both as regards wild man and wild beast, did not and does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene. The comparison is not fanciful. The teeming multitudes of wild creatures, the stu- pendous size of some of them, the terrible nature of others, and the low culture of many of the savage tribes, especially of the hunting tribes, substantially reproduces the conditions THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 3 of life in Europe as it was led by our ancestors ages before the dawn of anything that could be called civilization. The great beasts that now live in East Africa were in that by-gone age represented by close kinsfolk in Europe; and in many places, up to the present moment, African man, absolutely naked, and armed as our early paleolithic ancestors were armed, lives among, and on, and in constant dread of, these beasts, just as was true of the men to whom the cave lion was a nightmare of terror, and the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros possible but most formidable prey. This region, this great fragment out of the long-buried past of our race, is now accessible by railroad to all who care to go thither; and no field more inviting offers itself to hunter or naturalist, while even to the ordinary traveller it teems with interest. On March 23, 1909, I sailed thither from New York, in charge of a scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian, to collect birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants, but especially specimens of big game, for the National Museum at Washington. In addition to myself and my son Kermit (who had entered Harvard a few months previously), the party consisted of three naturalists: Surgeon-Lieut. Col. Edgar A. Mearns, U.S.A., retired; Mr. Edmund Heller, of California, and Mr. J. Alden Loring, of Owego, N. ie My arrangements for the trip had been chiefly made through two valued English friends, Mr. Frederick Courteney Selous, the greatest of the world’s big-game hunters, and’ Mr. Edward North Buxton, also a mighty hunter.) On landing we were to be met by Messrs. R. J. Cuninghame and Leslie Tarlton, both famous hunt- ers; the latter an Australian, who served through the South African war; the former by birth a Scotchman, and a Cam- 4 - AFRICAN GAME TRAILS bridge man, but long a resident of Africa, and at one time a professional elephant hunter—in addition to having been a whaler in the Arctic Ocean, a hunter-naturalist in Lap- land, a transport rider in South Africa, and a collector for the British Museum in various odd corners of the earth. We sailed on the Hamburg from New York—what head- way the Germans have made among those who go down to the sea in ships!—and at Naples trans-shipped to the Admiral, of another German line, the East African. On both ships we were as comfortable as possible, and the voyage was wholly devoid of incidents. Now and then, as at the Azores, at Suez, and at Aden, the three naturalists landed, and collected some dozens or scores of birds—which next day were skinned and prepared in my room, as the largest and best fitted for the purpose. After reaching Suez the ordinary tourist type of passenger ceased to be predomi- nant; in his place there were Italian officers going out to a desolate coast town on the edge of Somaliland; mission- aries, German, English, and American; Portuguese civil officials; traders of different nationalities; and planters and military and civil officers bound to German and British East Africa. The Englishmen included planters, magis- trates, forest officials, army officers on leave from India, and other army officers going out to take command of black native levies in out-of-the-way regions where the English flag stands for all that makes life worth living. They were a fine set, these young Englishmen, whether dashing army officers or capable civilians; they reminded me of our own men who have reflected such honor on the American name, whether in civil and military positions in the Philippines and Porto Rico, working on the Canal Zone in Panama, taking = THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 5 care of the custom-houses in San Domingo, or serving in the army of occupation in Cuba. Moreover, I felt as if I knew most of them already, for they might have walked out of the pages of Kipling. But I was not as well prepared for the corresponding and equally interesting types among the Germans, the planters, the civil officials, the officers who had commanded, or were about to command, white or na- tive troops; men of evident power and energy, seeing whom made it easy to understand why German East Africa has thriven apace. They are first-class men, these English and Germans; both are doing in East Africa a work of worth to the whole world; there is ample room for both, and no possible cause for any but a thoroughly friendly rivalry; and it is earnestly to be wished, in the interest both of them and of outsiders, too, that their relations will grow, as they ought to grow, steadily better—and not only in East Africa but everywhere else. On the ship, at Naples, we found Selous, also bound for East Africa on a hunting trip; but hé, a veteran whose first hunting in Africa was nearly forty years ago, cared only for exceptional trophies of a very few animals, while we, on the other hand, desired specimens of both sexes of all the species of big game that Kermit and I could shoot, as well as complete series of all the smaller mammals. We be- lieved that our best work of a purely scientific character - would be done with the mammals, both large and small. No other hunter alive has had the experience of Selous; and, so far as I now recall, no hunter of anything like his experience has ever also possessed his gift of penetrating observation joined to his power of vivid and accurate nar- ration. He has killed scores of lion and rhinoceros and atten 6 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS hundreds of elephant and bi buffalo; and these four animals are the most dangerous of the world’s big game, when hunted as they are hunted in Africa. To hear him tell of what he has seen and done is no less interesting to a nat- uralist than to a hunter. There were on the ship many men who loved wild nature, and who were keen hunters of big game; and almost every day, as we steamed over the hot, smooth waters of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, we would gather on deck around Selous to listen to tales of those strange adventures that only come to the man who has lived long the lonely life of the wilderness. | On April 21 we steamed into the beautiful and pictur- esque harbor of Mombasa. Many centuries before the Christian era, dhows from Arabia, carrying seafarers of Semitic races whose very names have perished, rounded the Lion’s Head at Guardafui and crept slowly southward along the barren African coast. Such dhows exist to-day almost unchanged, and bold indeed were the men who first steered them across the unknown oceans. They were men of iron heart and supple conscience, who fronted inconceiv- able danger and hardship; they established trading stations for gold and ivory and slaves; they turned these trading stations into little cities and sultanates, half Arab, half negro. __Mombasa was among them. In her time of brief splendor Portugal ‘seized the city; the Arabs won it back; and now England holds it. It lies just south of the equator, and when we saw it the brilliant green of the tropic foliage showed the town at its best. We were welcomed to Government House in most cordial fashion by the acting Governor, Lieutenant-Governor Jack- son, who is not only a trained public official of long experience THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 7 but a first-class field naturalist and a renowned big-game hunter; indeed I could not too warmly express my appre- ciation of the hearty and generous courtesy with which we were received and treated alike by the official and the un- official world throughout East Africa. We landed in the kind of torrential downpour that only comes in the tropics; it reminded me of Panama at certain moments in the rainy season. That night we were given a dinner by the Mom- basa Club; and it was interesting to meet the merchants and planters of the town and the neighborhood as well as the officials. The former included not only Englishmen but also Germans and Italians; which is quite as it should be, for at least part of the high inland region of British East Africa can be made one kind of “white man’s country”; and to achieve this white men should work heartily to- gether, doing scrupulous justice to the natives, but remem- bering that progress and development in this particular kind of new land depend exclusively upon the masterful leader- ship of the whites, and that therefore it is both a calamity and a crime to permit the whites to be riven in sunder by hatreds and jealousies. ‘The coast regions of British East Africa are not suited for extensive white settlement; but the hinterland is, and there everything should be done to en- courage such settlement. Non-white aliens should not be encouraged to settle where they come into rivalry with the whites (exception being made as regards certain particular individuals and certain particular occupations). There are, of course, large regions on the coast and in the interior where ordinary white settlers cannot live, in which it would be wise to settle immigrants from India, and there are many positions in other regions which it is to the 8 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS advantage of everybody that the Indians should hold, be- cause there is as yet no sign that sufficient numbers of white men are willing to hold them, while the native blacks, although many of them do fairly well in unskilled labor, are not yet competent to do the higher tasks which now fall to the share of the Goanese, and Moslem and non-Moslem Indians. ‘The small merchants who deal with the natives, for instance, and most of the minor railroad officials, belong to these latter classes. I was amused, by the way, at one bit of native nomenclature in connection with the Goanese. Many of the Goanese are now as dark as most of the other Indians; but they are descended in the male line from the early Portuguese adventurers and conquerors, who were the first white men ever seen by the natives of this coast. Ac- cordingly to this day some of the natives speak even of the dark-skinned descendants of the subjects of King Henry the Navigator as ‘“‘the whites,” designating the Europeans specifically as English, Germans, or the like; just as in out- of-the-way nooks in the far Northwest one of our own red men will occasionally be found who still speaks of Americans and Englishmen as ‘‘Boston men” and “King George’s men.” One of the Government farms was being run by an edu- cated colored man from Jamaica; and we were shown much courtesy by a colored man from our own country who was practising as a doctor. No one could fail to be impressed with the immense advance these men represented as com- pared with the native negro; and indeed to an American, who must necessarily think much of the race problem at home, it is pleasant to be made to realize in vivid fashion the progress the American negro has made, by comparing ——— THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 9 him with the negro who dwells in Africa untouched, or but lightly touched, by white influence. In such a community as one finds in Mombasa or Nairobi one continually runs across quiet, modest men whose lives have been fuller of wild adventure than the life of a viking leader of the ninth century. One of the public officials whom I met at the Governor’s table was Major Hinde. He had at one time served under the Government of the Congo Free State; and, at a crisis in the fortunes of the State, when the Arab slave traders bade fair to get the upper hand, he was one of the eight or ten white men, repre- senting half as many distinct nationalities, who overthrew the savage soldiery of the slave-traders and shattered beyond recovery the Arab power. They organized the wild pagan tribes just as their Arab foes had done; they fought in a land where deadly sickness struck down victor and van- quished with ruthless impartiality; they found their com- missariat as best they could wherever they happened to be; often they depended upon one day’s victory to furnish the ammunition with which to wage the morrow’s battle; and ever they had to be on guard no less against the thousands of cannibals in their own ranks than against the thousands of cannibals in the hostile ranks, for, on whichever side they fought, after every battle the warriors of the man-eating tribes watched their chance to butcher the wounded in- discriminately and to feast on the bodies of the slain. The most thrilling book of true lion stories ever written is Colonel Patterson’s “The Man-eaters of Tsavo.” Colonel Patterson was one of the® engineers engaged, some ten or twelve years back, in building the Uganda Railway; he was in charge of the work, at a place called Tsavo, when it 10 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS was brought to a complete halt by the ravages of a couple of man-eating lions which, after many adventures, he finally killed. At the dinner at the Mombasa Club I met one of the actors in a blood-curdling tragedy which Colonel Patter- son relates. He was a German, and, in company with an Italian friend, he went down in the special car of one of the English railroad officials to try to kill a man-eating lion which had carried away several people from a station on the line. They put the car on a siding; as it was hot the door was left open, and the Englishman sat by the open window to watch for the lion, while the Italian finally lay down on the floor and the German got into an upper bunk. Evi- dently the Englishman must have fallen asleep, and the lion, seeing him through the window, entered the carriage by the door to get at him. The Italian waked to find the lion standing on him with its hind feet, while its fore paws were on the seat as it killed the unfortunate Englishman, and the German, my informant, hearing the disturbance, leaped out of his bunk actually onto the back of the lion. The man-eater, however, was occupied only with his prey; holding the body in his mouth he forced his way out through the window sash, and made his meal undisturbed but a couple of hundred yards from the railway carriage. The day after we landed we boarded the train to take what seems to me, as I think it would to most men fond of natural history, the most interesting railway journey in the world. It was Governor Jackson’s special train, and in addi- tion to his own party and ours there was only Selous; and we travelled with the utmost comfort through a naturalist’s wonderland. All civilized governments are now realizing that it is their duty here and there to preserve, unharmed, THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 11 tracts of wild nature, with thereon the wild things the de- struction of which means the destruction of half the charm of wild nature. The English Government has made a large game reserve of much of the region on the way to Nairobi, stretching far to the south, and one mile to the north, of the track. The reserve swarms with game; it would be of little value except as a reserve; and the attraction it now offers to travellers renders it an asset of real consequence to the whole colony. The wise people of Maine, in our own country, have discovered that intelligent game preservation, carried out in good faith, and in a spirit of common sense as far removed from mushy sentimentality as from brutality, results in adding one more to the State’s natural resources of value; and in consequence there are more moose and deer in Maine to-day than there were forty years ago; there is a better chance for every man in Maine, rich or poor, pro- vided that he is not a game butcher, to enjoy his share of good hunting; and the number of sportsmen and tourists attracted to the State adds very appreciably to the means of livelihood of the citizen. Game reserves should not be established where they are detrimental to the interests of large bodies of settlers, nor yet should they be nominally established in regions so remote that the only men really interfered with are those who respect the law, while a pre- mium is thereby put on the activity of the unscrupulous persons who are eager to break it. Similarly, game laws should be drawn primarily in the interest of the whole peo- ple, keeping steadily in mind certain facts that ought to be self-evident to every one above the intellectual level of those well-meaning persons who apparently think that all shooting is wrong and that man could continue to exist 12 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS if all wild animals were allowed to increase unchecked. There must be recognition of the fact that almost any wild animal of the defenceless type, if its multiplication were unchecked while its natural enemies, the dangerous carni- vores, were killed, would by its simple increase crowd man off the planet; and of the further fact that, far short of such increase, a time speedily comes when the existence of too much game is incompatible with the interests, or indeed the existence, of the cultivator. As in most other matters, it is only the happy mean which is healthy and rational. There should be certain sanctuaries and nurseries where game can live and breed absolutely unmolested; and else- where the laws should so far as possible provide for the continued existence of the game in sufficient numbers to allow a reasonable amount of hunting on fair terms to any hardy and vigorous man fond of the sport, and yet not in sufficient numbers to jeopard the interests of the actual settler, the tiller of the soil, the man whose well-being should be the prime object to be kept in mind by every statesman. Game butchery is as objectionable as any other form of wanton cruelty or barbarity; but to protest against all hunting of game is a sign of softness of head, not of soundness of heart. In the creation of the great game reserve through which the Uganda Railway runs the British Government has conferred a boon upon mankind, and no less in the enact- ment and enforcement of the game laws in the African provinces generally. Of course experience will show where, from time to time, there must be changes. In Uganda proper buffaloes and hippos throve so under protection as to become sources of grave danger not only to the crops but THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 13 to the lives of the natives, and they had to be taken off the protected list and classed as vermin, to be shot in any num- bers at any time; and only the great demand for ivory prevented the necessity of following the same course with regard to the elephant; while recently in British East Africa the increase of the zebras, and the harm they did to the crops of the settlers, rendered it necessary to remove a large measure of the protection formerly accorded them, and in some cases actually to encourage their slaughter; and increase in settlement may necessitate further changes. But, speaking generally, much wisdom and foresight, highly creditable to both Government and people, have been shown in dealing with and preserving East African game while at the same time safeguarding the interests of the settlers. On our train the locomotive was fitted with a comfort- able seat across the cow-catcher, and on this, except at meal- time, I spent most of the hours of daylight, usually in com- pany with Selous, and often with Governor Jackson, to whom the territory and the game were alike familiar. The first afternoon we did not see many wild animals, but birds abounded, and the scenery was both beautiful and interest- ing. A black-and-white hornbill, feeding on the track, rose so late that we nearly caught it with our hands; guinea-fowl and francolin, and occasionally bustard, rose near by; bril- liant rollers, sun-birds, bee-eaters, and weaver-birds flew beside us, or sat unmoved among the trees as the train passed. In the dusk we nearly ran over a hyena; a year or two previously the train actually did run over a lioness one night, and the conductor brought in her head in triumph. In fact, there have been continual mishaps such as could 14 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS only happen to a railroad in the Pleistocene! The very night we went up there was an interruption in the telegraph service due to giraffes having knocked down some of the wires and a pole in crossing the track; and elephants have more than once performed the same feat. Two or three times, at night, giraffes have been run into and killed; once a rhinoceros was killed, the engine being damaged in the encounter; and on other occasions the rhino has only just left the track in time, once the beast being struck and a good deal hurt, the engine again being somewhat crippled. But the lions now offer, and have always offered, the chief source of unpleasant excitement. Throughout East Africa the lions continually take to man eating at the expense of the native tribes, and white hunters are continually being killed or crippled by them. At the lonely stations on the railroad the two or three subordinate officials often live in terror of some fearsome brute that has taken to haunting the vicinity; and every few months, at some one of these stations, a man is killed, or badly hurt by, or narrowly escapes from, a prowling lion. The stations at which the train stopped were neat and attractive; and besides the Indian officials there were usually natives from the neighborhood. Some of these might be dressed in the fez and shirt and trousers which indicate a coming under the white man’s influence, or which, rather curiously, may also indicate Mohammedan- ism. But most of the natives are still wild pagans, and many of them are unchanged in the slightest particular from what their forefathers were during the countless ages when they alone were the heirs of the land—a land which they were utterly powerless in any way to improve. Some THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 15 of the savages we saw wore red blankets, and in deference to white prejudice draped them so as to hide their naked- ness. But others appeared—men and women—with liter- ally not one stitch of clothing, although they might have rather elaborate hairdresses, and masses of metal ornaments on their arms and legs. In the region where one tribe dwelt all the people had their front teeth filed to sharp points; it was strange to see a group of these savages, stark naked, with oddly shaved heads and filed teeth, armed with primitive bows and arrows, stand gravely gazing at the train as it rolled into some station; and none the less strange, by the way, because the locomotive was a Bald- win, brought to Africa across the great ocean from our own country. One group of women, nearly nude, had their upper arms so tightly bound with masses of bronze or cop- per wire that their muscles were completely malformed. So tightly was the wire wrapped round the upper third of the upper arm, that it was reduced to about one-half of its normal size; and the muscles could only play, and that in deformed fashion, below this unyielding metal bandage. Why the arms did not mortify it was hard to say; and their freedom of use was so hampered as to make it difficult to understand how men or women whose whole lives are passed in one or another form of manual labor could inflict upon themselves such crippling and pointless punishment. Next morning we were in the game country, and as we sat on the seat over the cow-catcher it was literally like passing through a vast zoological garden. Indeed no such railway journey can be taken on any other line in any other land. At one time we passed a herd of a dozen or so of great giraffes, cows and calves, cantering along through the 16 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS open woods a couple of hundred yards to the right of the train. Again, still closer, four waterbuck cows, their big ears thrown forward, stared at us without moving until we had passed. Hartebeests were everywhere; one herd was on the track, and when the engine whistled they bucked and sprang with ungainly agility and galloped clear of the danger. A long-tailed straw-colored monkey ran from one tree to another. Huge black ostriches appeared from time to time. Once a troop of impalla, close by the track, took fright; and as the beautiful creatures fled we saw now one and now another bound clear over the high bushes. A herd of zebra clattered across a cutting of the line not a hundred yards ahead of the train; the whistle hurried their progress, but only for a moment, and as we passed they were already turning round to gaze. The wild creatures were in their sanctuary, and they knew it. Some of the settlers have at times grumbled at this game reserve being kept of such size; but surely it is one of the most valuable possessions the country could have. The lack of water in parts, the prevalence in other parts of diseases harmful to both civilized man and domestic cattle, render this great tract of country the home of all homes for the creatures of the waste. The protection given these wild creatures is genuine, not nominal; they are preserved, not for the pleasure of the few, but for the good of all who choose to see this strange and attractive spectacle; and from this nur- sery and breeding-ground the overflow keeps up the stock of game in the adjacent land, to the benefit of the settler to whom the game gives fresh meat, and to the benefit of the whole country because of the attraction it furnishes to all who desire to visit a veritable happy hunting ground. SS ee ee ee ee THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 17 Soon after lunch we drew up at the little station of Kapiti Plains, where our safari was awaiting us; “safari” being the term employed throughout East Africa to denote both the caravan with which one makes an expedition and the expedition itself. Our aim being to cure and send home specimens of all the common big game—in addition to as large a series as possible of the small mammals and birds —it was necessary to carry an elaborate apparatus of naturalists’ supplies; we had brought with us, for instance, four tons of fine salt, as to cure the skins of the big beasts is a herculean labor under the best conditions; we had hundreds of traps for the small creatures; many boxes of shot-gun cartridges in addition to the ordinary rifle cartridges which alone would be necessary on a hunting trip; and, in short, all the many impedimenta needed if scientific work is to be properly done under modern con- ditions. Few laymen have any idea of the expense and pains which must be undergone in order to provide groups of mounted big animals from far-off lands, such as we see in museums like the National Museum in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The modern naturalist must realize that in some of its branches his profession, while more than ever a science, has also become an art. So our preparations were neces- sarily on a very large scale; and as we drew up at the station the array of porters and of tents looked as if some small military expedition was about to start. As a compliment, which I much appreciated, a large American flag was float- ing over my own tent; and in the front line, flanking this tent on either hand, were other big tents for the members of the party, with a dining tent and skinning tent; while be- 18 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS hind were the tents of the two hundred porters, the gun- bearers, the tent boys, the askaris or native soldiers, and the horse boys or saises. In front of the tents stood the men in two lines; the first containing the fifteen askaris, the second the porters with their head men. The askaris were uniformed, each in a red fez, a blue blouse, and white knickerbockers, and each carrying his rifle and belt. The porters were chosen from several different tribes or races to minimize the danger of combination in the event of mutiny. Here and there in East Africa one can utilize ox wagons, or pack trains of donkeys; but for a considerable expedition it is still best to use a safari of native porters, of the type by which the commerce and exploration of the country have always been carried on. The backbone of such a safari is generally composed of Swahili, the coast men, negroes who have acquired the Moslem religion, together with a partially Arabicized tongue and a strain of Arab blood from the Arab warriors and traders who have been dominant in the coast towns for so many centuries. It was these Swahili trading caravans, under Arab leadership, which, in their quest for ivory and slaves, trod out the routes which the early white explorers followed. Without their work as a preliminary the work of the white explorers could not have been done; and it was the Swahili porters themselves who rendered this work itself possible. ‘To this day every hunter, trader, missionary, or explorer must use either a Swahili safari or one modelled on the Swahili basis. The part played by the white-topped ox wagon in the history of South Africa, and by the camel caravan in North Africa, has been played in middle Africa by the files of strong, patient, ee THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 19 childlike savages, who have borne the burdens of so many masters and employers hither and thither, through and across, the dark heart of the continent. Equatorial Africa is in most places none too healthy a place for the white man, and he must care for himself as he would scorn to do in the lands of pine and birch and frosty weather. Camping in the Rockies or the North Woods can with advantage be combined with “roughing it”; and the early pioneers of the West, the explorers, prospectors, and hunters, who always roughed it, were as hardy as bears, and lived to a hale old age, if Indians and accidents per- mitted. But in tropic Africa a lamentable proportion of the early explorers paid in health or life for the hardships they endured; and throughout most of the country no man can long rough it, in the Western and Northern sense, with impunity. At Kapiti Plains our tents, our accommodations gener- ally, seemed almost too comfortable for men who knew camp life only on the Great Plains, in the Rockies, and in the North Woods. My tent had a fly which was to protect it from the great heat; there was a little rear extension in which I bathed—a hot bath, never a cold bath, is almost a tropic necessity; there was a ground canvas, of vital mo- ment in a land of ticks, jiggers, and scorpions; and a cot to sleep on, so as to be raised from the ground. Quite a contrast to life on the round-up! Then I had two tent boys to see after my belongings, and to wait at table as well as in the tent. Ali, a Mohammedan mulatto (Arab and negro), was the chief of the two, and spoke some English, while under him was “Bill,” a speechless black boy; Ali being particularly faithful and efficient. Two other Moham- 20 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS medan negroes, clad like the askaris, reported to me as my gun-bearers, Muhamed and Bakari; seemingly excellent men, loyal and enduring, no trackers, but with keen eyes for game, and the former speaking a little English. My two horse boys, or saises, were both pagans. One, Hamisi, must have had in his veins Galla or other non-negro blood; derived from the Hamitic, or bastard Semitic, or at least non-negro, tribes which, pushing slowly and fitfully south- ward and south-westward among the negro peoples, have created an intricate tangle of ethnic and linguistic types from the middle Nile to far south of the equator. Hamisi always wore a long feather in one of his sandals, the only ornament he affected. The other sais was a silent, gentle- mannered black heathen; his name was Simba, a lion, and as I shall later show he was not unworthy of it. The two horses for which these men cared were stout, quiet little beasts; one, a sorrel, I named Tranquillity, and the other, a brown, had so much the coblike build of a zebra that we christened him Zebra-shape. One of Kermit’s two horses, by the way, was more romantically named after Huandaw, the sharp-eared steed of the Mabinogion. Cun- inghame, lean, sinewy, bearded, exactly the type of hunter and safari manager that one would wish for such an ex- pedition as ours, had ridden up with us on the train, and at the station we met Tarlton, and also two settlers of the neighborhood, Sir Alfred Pease and Mr. Clifford Hill. Hill was an Africander. He and his cousin, Harold Hill, after serving through the South African war, had come to the new country of British East Africa to settle, and they represented the ideal type of settler for taking the lead in the spread of empire. They were descended from the English RNS WSS Sete pee “ > ae Sor THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 21 colonists who came to South Africa in 1820; they had never been in England, and neither had Tarlton. It was exceed- ingly interesting to meet these Australians and Africanders, who typified in their lives and deeds the greatness of the English Empire, and yet had never seen England. As for Sir Alfred, Kermit and I were to be his guests for the next fortnight, and we owe primarily to him, to his mastery of hunting craft, and his unvarying and generous hospitality and kindness, the pleasure and success of our introduction to African hunting. His life had been one of such varied interest as has only been possible in our own generation. He had served many years in Parliament; he had for some years been a magistrate in a peculiarly re- sponsible post in the Transvaal; he had journeyed and hunted and explored in the northern Sahara, in the Soudan, in Somaliland, in Abyssinia; and now he was ranching in East Africa. A singularly good rider and one of the best game shots I have ever seen, it would have been impossible to have found a kinder host or a hunter better fitted to teach us how to begin our work with African big game. At Kapiti Station there was little beyond the station buildings, a “compound” or square enclosure in which there were many natives, and an Indian store. The last was presided over by a turbaned Mussulman, the agent of other Indian traders who did business in Machakos-boma, a native village a dozen miles distant; the means of com- munication being two-wheeled carts, each drawn by four humped oxen, driven by a well-nigh naked savage. For forty-eight hours we were busy arranging our out- fit; and the naturalists took much longer. ‘The provisions were those usually included in an African hunting or ex- 22 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS ploring trip, save that, in memory of my days in the West, I included in each provision box a few cans of Boston baked beans, California peaches, and tomatoes. We had plenty of warm bedding, for the nights are cold at high altitudes, | even under the equator. While hunting I wore heavy shoes, with hobnails or rubber soles; khaki trousers, the | knees faced with leather, and the legs buttoning tight from the knee to below the ankle, to avoid the need of leggings; | a khaki-colored army shirt; and a sun helmet, which I wore in deference to local advice, instead of my beloved | and far more convenient slouch hat. My rifles were an army Springfield, 30-calibre, stocked and sighted to suit | myself; a Winchester 405; and a double-barrelled 500-450 : Holland, a beautiful weapon presented to me by some English friends.* * Mr. E. N. Buxton took the lead in the matter when he heard that I intended making a trip after big game in Africa. I received the rifle at the White House, while I was President. Inside the case was the following list of donors: LIST OF ZOOLOGISTS AND SPORTSMEN WHO ARE DONORS OF A DOUBLE ELEPHANT RIFLE TO THE HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, PRESIDENT U. S. A. IN RECOGNITION OF HIS SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE PRESERVATION OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATIONAL PARKS AND FOREST RESERVES, AND BY OTHER MEANS E. N. Buxton, Esq. Rt. Hon. Lorp Avesury, D.C.L. (‘‘The Pleasures of Life,” etc.) Major-Gen. Sir F. REGINALD WINGATE, K.C.B. (Governor-General of the Soudan.) Str Epmunp G. LopEr, Bart. Hon. N. C. RoTHscHILp. THE Eart or LONSDALE. (Master of Hounds.) Sir R. G. Harvey, Bart. Tue Rt. Hon. Lorp Curzon oF KEDLEsSTON, G.C.S.I., G.C.LE. St. GEORGE LITTLEDALE, Esq. Dr. P. CHALMERS MiTcHELL, F.R.S., F.Z.S. (Secretary of the Zoological Soc.) C. E. Green, Esq. (Master of Essex Hounds.) F. C. Setous, Ese. (‘A Hunter’s Wanderings,” etc.) Count BLUCHER. THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 23 Kermit’s battery was of the same type, except that in- stead of a Springfield he had another Winchester shooting the army ammunition, and his double-barrel was a Rigby. In addition I had a Fox No. 12 shot-gun; no better gun was ever made. There was one other bit of impedimenta, less usual for African travel, but perhaps almost as essential for real en- joyment even on a hunting trip, if it is to be of any length. This was the “Pigskin Library,” so called because most of the books were bound in pigskin. They were carried in a light aluminum and oil-cloth case, which, with its con- tents, weighed a little less than sixty pounds, making a load for one porter. Including a few volumes carried in the various bags, so that I might be sure always to have one with me, and Gregorovius, read on the voyage outward, the list was as printed in Appendix F. Lrevut.-Cort. C. DELME RapctirrE, C.M.G., M.V.O. MAvRICE EGERTON, Esq. Lorp DesxBoroucH, C.V.O. CapTAIn M. McNEILL. CLAUDE H. Tritton, Esq. J. TuRNER-TuRNER, Esq. Hon. L. W. Roruscuitp, M.P. Rr. Hon. Sir E. Grey, Bart., M.P. (Foreign Secretary and author of ‘Dry Fly Fishing.”’) Sir M. DE C. Finptay, C.M.G. (British Minister at Dresden.) C. Puitiiprs-Wottey, Esq., F.R.G.S. (‘Sport in the Caucasus.’’) Rt. Hon. Sir G. O. TREVELYAN, Bart., D.C.L. (‘‘The American Revolution.’’) WARBURTON PIKE, Esq. Str Wm. E. Garstin, G.C.M.G. His GRACE THE DukE or BEpForD, K.G. (‘‘A Great Estate.’’) HER GRACE THE DucHEss oF BEDFORD. Lorp Brassey, G.C.B., M.V.O. (Owner of The Sunbeam.) Hon. T. A. Brassey. (Editor of the Naval Annual.) Rays Witiams, Esq. Major-Gen. A. A. A. Kintocu, C.B. (‘Large Game in Thibet.”’) Sir Wa. Lee-Warner, K.C.S.I. (‘The Protected Princes of India.’’) Tue Rt. Rev. THE Lorp BisHop or LONDON. Mayjor-Gen. DALRYMPLE WHITE. 24 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS It represents in part Kermit’s taste, in part mine; and, I need hardly say, it also represents in no way all the books we most care for, but merely those which, for one reason or another, we thought we should like to take on this par- ticular trip. I used my Whitman tree army saddle and my army field-glasses; but, in addition, for studying the habits of the game, I carried a telescope given me on the boat by a fellow traveller and big-game hunter, an Irish hussar cap- tain from India—and incidentally I am out in my guess if this same Irish hussar captain be not worth watching should his country ever again be engaged in war. I had a very ingenious beam or scale for weighing game, designed and presented to me by my friend, Mr. Thompson Seton. I had a slicker for wet weather, an army overcoat, and a mackinaw jacket for cold, if I had to stay out over night in COLONEL CLAUDE CANE. Rt. Hon. SypNEY Buxton, M.P. (Postmaster General, ‘‘Fishing and Shooting.’’) Major C. E. Rapctyrre, D.S.O. Sir A. E. PEAsE, Bart. (“Cleveland Hounds.”’) Sir H. H. Jounston, K.C.B., G.C.M.G. (‘The Uganda Protectorate.”) ; ABEL CHAPMAN, Esq. (“‘Wild Spain.’’) J. G. Mitrais, Esq., F.Z.S. (“A Breath from the Veldt.’’) E. Lort-Puiuies, Esq. (Author of ornithological works.) R. Kearton, Esq., F.Z.S. (‘Wild Nature’s Ways.”’) J. H. Gurney, Esq., F.Z.S. (Works on ornithology.) F, J. Jackson, C.B., C.M.G., LizutT.-GOVERNOR EAsT AFRICAN PROTECTORATE. (‘Big Game,” Badminton Library.) Cor. Sir F. Lucarp, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O. Lapy Lucarp. (‘‘A Tropical Dependency.”) Stir CLremMenT L. Hirt, K.C.B., M.P. (Late Head of the African Department: Foreign O.) Sir H. SeTon-Karr, M.P., C.M.G. (‘‘My Sporting Holidays.’’) CapTaAIN Boyp ALEXANDER. (‘From the Niger to the Nile.’’) Sir J. Kirk, K.C.B., G.C.M.G. (Dr. Livingstone’s companion, 1858-64.) MorETON FREWEN, Esq. THe EArt oF WARWICK. P. L. Sctater, Esq., D.Sc., Po.D. (Late Sec. Zool. Soc.) Cor. J. H. Patterson, D.S.O. (“The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.”) THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 25 the mountains. In my pockets I carried, of course, a knife, a compass, and a water-proof matchbox. Finally, just be- fore leaving home, I had been sent, for good luck, a gold- mounted rabbit’s foot, by Mr. John L. Sullivan, at one time ring champion of the world. Our camp was on a bare, dry plain, covered with brown and withered grass. At most hours of the day we could see round about, perhaps a mile or so distant, or less, the game feeding. South of the track the reserve stretched for a long distance; north it went for but a mile, just enough to prevent thoughtless or cruel people from shooting as they went by in the train. There was very little water; what we drank, by the way, was carefully boiled. The drawback to the camp, and to all this plains region, lay in the ticks, which swarmed, and were a scourge to man and beast. Every evening the saises picked them by hundreds off each horse; and some of our party were at times so bitten by the noisome little creatures that they could hardly sleep at night, and in one or two cases the man was actually laid up for a couple of days; and two of our horses ultimately got tick fever, but recovered. In mid-afternoon of our third day in this camp we at last had matters in such shape that Kermit and I could begin our hunting; and forth we rode, he with Hill, I with Sir Alfred, each accompanied by his gun-bearers and sais, and by a few porters to carry in the game. For two or three miles our little horses shuffled steadily northward across the desolate flats of short grass until the ground began to rise here and there into low hills, or koppies, with rock-strewn tops. It should have been the rainy season, the season of “the big rains”; but the rains were late, as 26 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS the parched desolation of the landscape bore witness; nev- ertheless there were two or three showers that afternoon. We soon began to see game, but the flatness of the country and the absence of all cover made stalking a matter of diffi- culty; the only bushes were a few sparsely scattered mimo- sas; stunted things, two or three feet high, scantily leaved, but abounding in bulbous swellings on the twigs, and in long, sharp spikes of thorns. ‘There were herds of harte- beest and wildebeest, and smaller parties of beautiful ga- zelles. The last were of two kinds, named severally after their discoverers, the explorers Grant and Thomson; many of the creatures of this region commemorate the men— Schilling, Jackson, Neuman, Kirke, Chanler, Abbot— who first saw and hunted them and brought them to the notice of the scientific world. The Thomson’s gazelles, or Tommies as they are always locally called, are pretty, alert little things, half the size of our prongbuck; their big brothers, the Grant’s, are among the most beautiful of all antelopes, being rather larger than a whitetail deer, with singularly graceful carriage, while the old bucks carry long lyre-shaped horns. Distances are deceptive on the bare plains under the African sunlight. I saw a fine Grant, and stalked him in a rain squall; but the bullets from the little Springfield fell short as he raced away to safety; I had underestimated the range. Then I shot, for the table, a good buck of the smaller gazelle, at two hundred and twenty-five yards; the bullet went a little high, breaking his back above the shoulders. But what I really wanted were two good specimens, bull and cow, of the wildebeest. These powerful, ungainly THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 27 beasts, a variety of the brindled gnu or blue wildebeest of South Africa, are interesting creatures of queer, eccentric habits. With their shaggy manes, heavy forequarters, and generally bovine look, they remind one somewhat of our bison, at a distance, but of course they are much less bulky, a big old bull in prime condition rarely reaching a weight of seven hundred pounds. They are beasts of the open plains, ever alert and wary; the cows, with their calves, and one or more herd bulls, keep in parties of several score; the old bulls, singly, or two or three together, keep by themselves, or with herds of zebra, hartebeest, or gazelle; for one of the interesting features of African wild life is the close asso- ciation and companionship so often seen between totally different species of game. Wildebeest are as savage as they are suspicious; when wounded they do not hesitate to charge a man who comes close, although of course neither they nor any other antelopes can be called dangerous when in a wild state, any more than moose or other deer can be called dan- gerous; when tame, however, wildebeest are very dangerous indeed, more so than an ordinary domestic bull. The wild, queer-looking creatures prance and rolick and cut strange capers when a herd first makes up its mind to flee from a stranger’s approach; and even a solitary bull will sometimes plunge and buck as it starts to gallop off; while a couple of bulls, when the herd is frightened, may relieve their feelings by a moment’s furious battle, occasionally dropping to their knees before closing. At this time, the end of April, there were little calves with the herds of cows; but in many places in equatorial Africa the various species of antelopes seem to have no settled rutting time or breeding time; at least we saw calves of all ages. 28 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS Our hunt after wildebeest this afternoon was successful; but though by velt law each animal was mine, because I hit it first, yet in reality the credit was communistic, so to speak, and my share was properly less than that of others. I first tried to get up to a solitary old bull, and after a good deal of. manceuvring, and by taking advantage of a second rain squall, I got a standing shot at him at four hundred yards, and hit him, but too far back. Although keeping a good distance away, he tacked and veered so, as he ran, that by much running myself I got various other shots at him, at very long range, but missed them all, and he finally galloped over a distant ridge, his long tail switching, seem- ingly not much the worse. We followed on horseback; for I hate to let any wounded thing escape to suffer. But meanwhile he had run into view of Kermit; and Kermit— who is of an age and build which better fit him for suc- cessful breakneck galloping over unknown country dotted with holes and bits of rotten ground—took up the chase with enthusiasm. Yet it was sunset, after a run of six or eight miles, when he finally ran into and killed the tough old bull, which had turned to bay, snorting and tossing its horns. Meanwhile I managed to get within three hundred and fifty yards of a herd, and picked out a large cow which was unaccompanied by a calf. Again my bullet went too far back; and I could not hit the animal at that distance as it ran. But after going half a mile it lay down, and would have been secured without difficulty if a wretched dog had not run forward and put it up; my horse was a long way back, but Pease, who had been looking on at a distance, was mounted, and sped after it. By the time I had reached my horse Pease was out of sight; but riding A herd of zebra and hartebeest One of the interesting features of African wild life is the close association and companionship so often seen between two totally different species of game From photographs by Kermit Roosevelt THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 29 hard for some miles I overtook him, just before the sun went down, standing by the cow which he had ridden down and slain. It was long after nightfall before we reached camp, ready for a hot bath and a good supper. As always thereafter with anything we shot, we used the meat for food and preserved the skins for the National Museum. Both the cow and the bull were fat and in fine condition; but they were covered with ticks, especially wherever the skin was bare. Around the eyes the loathsome creatures swarmed so as to make complete rims, like spectacles; and in the armpits and the groin they were massed so that they looked like barnacles on an old boat. It is astonishing that the game should mind them so little; the wildebeest evidently dreaded far more the biting flies which hung around them; and the maggots of the bot-flies in their nostrils must have been a sore torment. Nature is mer- ciless indeed. The next day we rode some sixteen miles to the beautiful hills of Kitanga, and for over a fortnight were either Pease’s guests at his farm—ranch, as we should call it in the West —or were on safari under his guidance. CHAPTER II ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH Tue house at which we were staying stood on the beau- tiful Kitanga hills. “They were so named after an English- man, to whom the natives had given the name of Kitanga; some years ago, as we were told, he had been killed by a lion near where the ranch house now stood; and we were shown his grave in the little Machakos graveyard. The house was one story high, clean and comfortable, with a veranda running round three sides; and on the veranda were lion skins and the skull of a rhinoceros. From the house we looked over hills and wide lonely plains; the green valley below, with its flat-topped acacias, was very lovely; and in the evening we could see, scores of miles away, the snowy summit of mighty Kilimanjaro turn crimson in the setting sun. The twilights were not long; and when night fell, stars new to northern eyes flashed glorious in the sky. Above the horizon hung the Southern Cross, and directly opposite in the heavens was our old familiar friend the Wain, the Great Bear, upside down and pointing to a North Star so low behind a hill that we could not see it. It is a dry country, and we saw it in the second year of a drought; yet I believe it to be a country of high promise for settlers of white race. In many ways it reminds one rather curiously of the great plains of the West, where they slope upward to the foot-hills of the Rockies. It is a 30 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 31 white man’s country. Although under the equator, the altitude is so high that the nights are cool, and the re- gion as a whole is very healthy. I saw many children, of the Boer immigrants, of English settlers, even of American missionaries, and they looked sound and well. Of course, there was no real identity in any feature; but again and again the landscape struck me by its general likeness to the cattle country I knew so well. As my horse shuffled forward, under the bright, hot sunlight, across the endless flats or gently rolling slopes of brown and withered grass, I might have been on the plains anywhere, from Texas to Mentana; the hills were like our Western buttes; the half-dry water- courses were fringed with trees, just as if they had been the Sandy, or the Dry, or the Beaver, or the Cottonwood, or any of the multitude of creeks that repeat these and similar names, again and again, from the Panhandle to the Saskatchewan. Moreover a Westerner, far better than an Easterner, could see the possibilities of the country. There should be storage reservoirs in the hills and along the rivers -—in my judgment built by the government, and paid for by the water-users in the shape of water-rents—and irriga- tion ditches; with the water stored and used there would be an excellent opening for small farmers, for the settlers, the actual home-makers, who, above all others, should be encouraged to come into a white man’s country like this of the highlands of East Africa. Even as it is, many settlers do well; it is hard to realize that right under the equator the conditions are such that wheat, potatoes, strawberries, apples, all flourish. No new country is a place for weak- lings; but the right kind of man, the settler who makes a success in similar parts of our own West, can do well in 32 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS East Africa; while a man with money can undoubtedly do very well indeed; and incidentally both men will be lead- ing their lives under conditions peculiarly attractive to a certain kind of spirit. It means hard work, of course; but success generally does imply hard work. The plains were generally covered only with the thick grass on which the great herds of game fed; here and there small thorn-trees grew upon them, but usually so small and scattered as to give no shelter or cover. By the oc- casional watercourses the trees grew more thickly, and also on the hills and in the valleys between. Most of the trees were mimosas, or of similar kind, usually thorny; but there were giant cactus-like Euphorbias, shaped like candela- bra, and named accordingly; and on the higher hills fig- trees, wild olives, and many others whose names I do not know, but some of which were stately and beautiful. Many of the mimosas were in bloom, and covered with sweet- smelling yellow blossoms. ‘There were many flowers. On the dry plains there were bushes of the color and size of our own sage-brush, covered with flowers like morning- glories. There were also wild sweet-peas, on which the ostriches fed; as they did on another plant with a lilac flower of a faint heliotrope fragrance. Among the hills there were masses of singularly fragrant flowers like pink jessamines, growing on bushes sometimes fifteen feet high or over. There were white flowers that smelt like narcissus, blue flowers, red lilies, orange tiger-lilies, and many others of many kinds and colors, while here and there in the pools of the rare rivers grew the sweet-scented purple lotus-lily. There was an infinite variety of birds, small and large, dull-colored and of the most brilliant plumage. For the ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 33 most part they either had no names at all or names that meant nothing to us. There were glossy starlings of many kinds; and scores of species of weaver finches, some brill- iantly colored, others remarkable because of the elaborate nests they built by communities among the trees. There were many kinds of shrikes, some of them big, parti-colored birds, almost like magpies, and with a kestrel-like habit of hovering in the air over one spot; others very small and prettily colored. There was a little red-billed finch with its outer tail feathers several times the length of its head and body. There was a little emerald cuckoo, and a tiny thing, a barbet, that looked exactly like a kingfisher four inches long. Eared owls flew up from the reeds and grass. There were big, restless, wonderfully colored plantain-eaters in the woods; and hornbills, with strange swollen beaks. A true lark, colored like our meadow-lark (to which it is in no way related) sang from bushes; but the clapper-lark made its curious clapping sounds (apparently with its wings like a ruffed grouse) while it zigzagged in the air. Little pipits sang overhead like our Missouri skylarks. There were night-jars; and doves of various kinds, one of which uttered a series of notes slightly resembling the call of our whippoorwill or chuckwills widow. The beautiful little sun- birds were the most gorgeous of all. Then there were bus- tards, great and small, and snake-eating secretary birds, on the plains; and francolins, and African spurfowl with brilliant naked throats, and sand grouse that flew in packs uttering guttural notes. The wealth of bird life was be- wildering. There was not much bird music, judged by the standards of a temperate climate; but the bulbuls, and one or two warblers, sang very sweetly. The naturalists 34 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS caught shrews and mice in their traps; mole rats with vel- vety fur, which burrowed like our pocket gophers; rats that lived in holes like those of our kangaroo rat; and one mouse that was striped like our striped gopher. There were conies among the rocks on the hills; they looked like squat, heavy woodchucks, but their teeth were somewhat like those of a wee rhinoceros, and they had little hoof-like nails instead of claws. ‘There were civets and wild-cats and things like a small mongoose. But the most interesting mammal we saw was a brilliantly colored yellow and blue, or yellow and slate, bat, which we put up one day while beating through a ravine. It had been hanging from a mimosa twig, and it flew well in the strong sunlight, look- ing like some huge, parti-colored butterfly. It was a settled country, this in which we did our first hunting, and for this reason all the more interesting. The growth and development of East and Middle Africa are phenomena of such absorbing interest, that I was de- lighted at the chance to see the parts where settlement has already begun before plunging into the absolute wilder- ness. ‘There was much to remind one of conditions in Montana and Wyoming thirty years ago; the ranches planted down among the hills and on the plains still teem- ing with game, the spirit of daring adventure everywhere visible, the hope and the heart-breaking disappointment, the successes and the failures. But the problem offered by the natives bore no resemblance to that once offered by the presence of our tribes of horse Indians, few in numbers and incredibly formidable in war. The natives of East Africa are numerous; many of them are agricultural or pas- toral peoplés after their own fashion; and even the bravest ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 35 of them, the warlike Masai, are in no way formidable as our Indians were formidable when they went on the war- path. The ranch country I first visited was in what was once the domain of the Wakamba, and in the greater part of it the tribes still dwell. ‘They are in most ways primitive savages, with an imperfect and feeble social, and therefore military, organization; they live in small communities under their local chiefs; they file their teeth, and though they wear blankets in the neighborhood of the whites, these blankets are often cast aside; even when the blanket is worn, it is often in such fashion as merely to accentuate the otherwise abso- lute nakedness of both sexes. Yet these savages are cattle- keepers and cattle-raisers, and the women do a good deal of simple agricultural work; unfortunately, they are waste- fully destructive of the forests. The chief of each little vil- lage is recognized as the official headman by the British official, is given support, and is required to help the authori- ties keep peace and stamp out cattle disease—the two most important functions of government so far as the Wakamba themselves are concerned. All the tribes have their herds of black, brown, and white goats, of mottled sheep, and especially of small humped cattle. The cattle form their pride and joy. During the day each herd is accompanied by the herdsmen, and at night it is driven within its boma, or circular fence of thorn-bushes. Except for the milk, which they keep in their foul, smoky calabashes, the natives really make no use of their cattle; they do not know how to work them, and they never eat them even in time of starvation. When there is prolonged drought and conse- quent failure of crops, the foolish creatures die by the hun- dreds when they might readily be saved if they were willing 36 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS to eat the herds which they persist in treating as ornaments rather than as made for use. Many of the natives work for the settlers, as cattle- keepers, as ostrich-keepers, or, after a fashion, as laborers. The settlers evidently much prefer to rely upon the natives for unskilled labor rather than see coolies from Hindostan brought into the country. At Sir Alfred Pease’s ranch, as at most of the other farms of the neighborhood, we found little Wakamba settlements. Untold ages separated em- ployers and employed; yet those that I saw seemed to get on well together. The Wakamba are as yet not sufficiently advanced to warrant their sharing in the smallest degree in the common government; the “just consent of the governed” in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, famine, and endless internecine warfare. They cannot govern them- selves from within; therefore they must be governed from without; and their need is met in highest fashion by firm and just control, of the kind that on the whole they are now getting. At Kitanga the natives on the place some- times worked about the house; and they took care of the stock. The elders looked after the mild little humped cat- tle—bulls, steers, and cows; and the children, often the merest toddlers, took naturally to guarding the parties of pretty little calves, during the day-time, when they were separated from their mothers. It was an ostrich-farm, too; and in the morning and evening we would meet the great birds, as they went to their grazing-grounds or returned to the ostrich boma, mincing along with their usual air of foolish stateliness, convoyed by two or three boys, each with a red blanket, a throwing stick, copper wire round his legs and arms, and perhaps a feather stuck in his hair. ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 37 There were a number of ranches in the neighborhood— using ‘‘neighborhood” in the large Western sense, for they were many miles apart. The Hills, Clifford and Harold, were Africanders; they knew the country, and were work- ing hard and doing well; and in the midst of their work they spared the time to do their full part in insuring a suc- cessful hunt to me, an entire stranger. All the settlers I met treated me with the same large and thoughtful courtesy —and what fine fellows they were! And their wives even finer. At Bondoni was Percival, a tall sinewy man, a fine rider and shot; like so many other men whom I met, he wore merely a helmet, a flannel shirt, short breeches or trunks, and puttees and boots, leaving the knee entirely bare. I shall not soon forget seeing him one day, as he walked beside his twelve-ox team, cracking his long whip, while in the big wagon sat pretty Mrs. Percival with a puppy, and a little cheetah cub, which we had found and presented to her and which she was taming. They all—Sir Alfred, the Hills, every one—behaved as if each was my host and felt it peculiarly incumbent on him to give me a good time; and among these hosts one who did very much for me was Captain Arthur Slatter. I was his guest at Kilimakiu, where he was running an ostrich-farm; he had lost his right hand, yet he was an exceedingly good game shot, both with his light and his heavy rifles. At Kitanga, Sir Alfred’s place, two Boers were working, Messrs. Prinsloo and Klopper. We forgathered, of course, as I too was of Dutch ancestry; they were strong, upstand- ing men, good mechanics, good masons, and Prinsloo spoke English well. I afterward stopped at the farm of Klopper’s father, and at the farm of another Boer named Loijs; and 38 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS I met other Boers while out hunting—Erasmus, Botha, Joubert, Meyer. They were descendants of the Voortrek- kers with the same names who led the hard-fighting farmers northward from the Cape seventy years ago; and were kinsfolk of the men who since then have made these names honorably known throughout the world. There must of course be many Boers who have gone backward under the stress of a hard and semi-savage life; just as in our com- munities of the frontier, the backwoods, and the lonely mountains, there are shiftless ‘poor whites” and “‘mean whites,”’ mingled with the sturdy men and women who have laid deep the foundations of our national greatness. But personally I happened not to come across these shiftless “mean white” Boers. Those that I met, both men and women, were of as good a type as any one could wish for in his own countrymen or could admire in another nation- ality. They fulfilled the three prime requisites for any race: they worked hard, they could fight hard at need, and they had plenty of children. These are the three essential qualities in any and every nation; they are by no means all-sufficient in themselves, and there is need that many others should be added to them; but the lack of any one of them is fatal, and cannot be made good by the presence of any other set of attributes. It was pleasant to see the good terms on which Boer and Briton met. Many of the English settlers whose guest I was, or with whom I hunted—the Hills, Captain Slatter, Heatley, Judd—had fought through the South African war; and so had all the Boers I met. The latter had been for the most part members of various particularly hard-fighting commandos; when the war closed they felt very bitterly, ee ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 39 and wished to avoid living under the British flag. Some moved West and some East; those I met were among the many hundreds, indeed thousands, who travelled northward —a few overland, most of them by water—to German East Africa. But in the part in which they happened to settle they were decimated by fever, and their stock perished of cattle sickness; and most of them had again moved north- ward, and once more found themselves under the British flag. They were being treated precisely on an equality with the British settlers; and every well-wisher to his kind, and above all every well-wisher to Africa, must hope that the men who in South Africa fought so valiantly against one another, each for the right as he saw it, will speedily grow into a companionship of mutual respect, regard, and con- sideration such as that which, for our inestimable good fort- une, now knits closely together in our own land the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray and their descendants. There could be no better and manlier people than those, both English and Dutch, who are at this moment engaged in the great and difficult task of add- ing East Africa to the domain of civilization; their work is bound to be hard enough anyhow; and it would be a lam- entable calamity to render it more difficult by keeping alive a bitterness which has lost all point and justification, or by failing to recognize the fundamental virtues, the fun- damental characteristics, in which the men of the two stocks are in reality so much alike. Messrs. Klopper and Loijs, whose farms I visited, were doing well; the latter, with three of his sons, took me out with pride to show me the dam which they had built across a dry watercourse, so as to make a storage reservoir when 40 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS the rains came. The houses were of stone, and clean and comfortable; the floors were covered with the skins of buck and zebra; the chairs were home-made, as was most of the other furniture; the “rust bunks,” or couches, strongly and gracefully shaped, and filled with plaited raw hide, were so attractive that I ordered one to take home. ‘There were neatly kept little flower-gardens, suffering much from the drought; there were ovens and out-buildings; cattle-sheds for the humped oxen and the herds of pretty cows and calves; the biltong was drying in smoke-houses; there were patches of ground in cultivation, for corn and veg- etables; and the wild velt came up to the door-sills, and the wild game grazed quietly on all sides within sight of the houses. It was a very good kind of pioneer life; and there could be no better pioneer settlers than Boers such as I saw. The older men wore full beards, and were spare and sinewy. The young men were generally smooth-faced or mustached, strongly built, and rather shy. The elder women were stout, cordial, motherly housewives; the younger were often really pretty. At their houses I was received with hearty hospitality, and given coffee or fresh milk, while we conversed through the medium of the sons or daughters who knew a little English. They all knew that I was of Dutch origin, and were much interested when I repeated to them the only Dutch I knew, a nursery song which, as I told them, had been handed down to me by my own forefathers, and which in return I had repeated, so many, many times, to my children when they were little. It runs as follows, by the way; but I have no idea how the words are spelled, as I have no written copy; it is supposed eee ee ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 41 to be sung by the father, who holds the little boy or little girl on his knee, and tosses him or her up in the air when he comes to the last line: Trippa, troppa, tronjes, De varken’s in de boonjes, De koejes in de klaver, De paardeen in de haver, De eenjes in de water-plass! So groot myn kleine (here insert the little boy’s or little girl’s name) wass! My pronunciation caused trouble at first; but I think they understood me the more readily because doubtless their own usual tongue was in some sort a dialect; and some of them already knew the song, while they were all pleased and amused at my remembering and repeating it; and we were speedily on a most friendly footing. The essential identity of interest between the Boer and British settlers was shown by their attitude toward the district commissioner, Mr. Humphery, who was just leaving for his biennial holiday, and who dined with us in our tent on his way out. From both Boer farmer and English settler—and from the American missionaries also —I heard praise of Humphery, as a strong man, not in the least afraid of either settler or native, but bound to do justice to both, and, what was quite as important, sympa- thizing with the settlers and knowing and understanding their needs. A new country in which white pioneer settlers are struggling with the iron difficulties and hardships of frontier life is above all others that in which the officials should be men having both knowledge and sympathy with 42 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS the other men over whom they are placed and for whom they should work. My host and hostess, Sir Alfred and Lady Pease, were on the best terms with all their neighbors, and their friendly interest was returned; now it was the wife of a Boer farmer who sent over a basket of flowers, now came a box of apples from an English settler on the hills; now Prinsloo the Boer stopped to dinner; now the McMillans—Ameri- can friends, of whose farm and my stay thereon I shall speak later—rode over from their house on the Mua Hills, with their guest, Selous, to take lunch. This, by the way, was after I had shot my first lions, and I was much pleased to be able to show Selous the trophies. My gentle-voiced hostess and her daughter had seen many strange lands and strange happenings; as was nat- ural with a husband and father of such adventure-loving nature. They took a keen interest, untinged by the slightest nervousness, in every kind of wild creature from lions and leopards down. ‘The game was in sight from the veranda of the house almost every hour of the day. Early one morn- ing, in the mist, three hartebeests came right up to the wire fence, two score yards from the house itself; and the black-and-white striped zebra, and ruddy hartebeest, grazed or rested through the long afternoons in plain view, on the hillsides opposite. It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to realize the immense quantities of game to be found on the Kapiti Plains and Athi Plains and the hills that bound them. The common game of the plains, the animals of which I _ saw most while at Kitanga and in the neighborhood, were the zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant’s gazelle, and ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 43 ““Tommies” or Thomson’s gazelle; the zebra, and the hartebeest, usually known by the Swahili name of kon- goni, being by far the most plentiful. Then there were impalla, mountain reedbuck, duiker, steinbuck, and dimin- utive dikdik. As we travelled and hunted we were hardly ever out of sight of game; and on Pease’s farm itself there were many thousand head; and so there were on Slatter’s. If wealthy men who desire sport of the most varied and interesting kind would purchase farms like these they could get, for much less money, many times the interest and enjoyment a deer-forest or grouse-moor can afford. The wildebeest or gnu were the shyest and least plenti- ful, but in some ways the most interesting, because of the queer streak of ferocious eccentricity evident in all their actions. They were of all the animals those that were most exclusively dwellers in the open, where there was neither hill nor bush. Their size and their dark bluish hides, some- times showing white in the sunlight, but more often black, rendered them more easily seen than any of their com- panions. But hardly any plains animal of any size makes any effort to escape its enemies by eluding their observa- tion. Very much of what is commonly said about “pro- tective coloration” has no basis whatever in fact. Black and white are normally the most conspicuous colors in nature (and yet are borne by numerous creatures who have succeeded well in the struggle for life); but almost any tint, or combination of tints, among the grays, browns and duns, harmonizes fairly well with at least some sur- roundings, in most landscapes; and in but a few instances among the larger mammals, and in almost none among those frequenting the open plains, is there the slightest 44 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS reason for supposing that the creature gains any benefit whatever from what is loosely called its “protective colora- tion.” Giraffes, leopards and zebras, for instance, have actually been held up as instances of creatures that are “‘protectingly”’ colored and are benefited thereby. The giraffe is one of the most conspicuous objects in nature, and never makes the slightest effort to hide; near by its mottled hide is very noticeable, but as a matter of fact, under any ordinary circumstances any possible foe trust- ing to eyesight would discover the giraffe so far away that its coloring would seem uniform, that is, would because of the distance be indistinguishable from a general tint which really might have a slight protective value. In other words while it is possible that the giraffe’s beautifully waved color- ing may under certain circumstances, and in an infinitesi- mally small number of cases, put it at a slight disadvantage in the struggle for life, in the enormous majority of cases— a majority so great as to make the remaining cases negligi- ble—it has no effect whatever, one way or the other; and it is safe to say that under no conditions is its coloring of the slightest value to it as affording it “protection” from foes trusting to their eyesight. So it is with the leopard; it is undoubtedly much less conspicuous than if it were black—and yet the black leopards, the melanistic individ- uals, thrive as well as their spotted brothers; while on the whole it is probably slightly more conspicuous than if it were nearly unicolor, like the American cougar. As compared with the cougar’s tawny hide the leopard’s coloration represents a very slight disadvantage, and not an advantage, to the beast; but its life is led under conditions which make either the advantage or the disadvantage so slight as to be negligible; or ee eee ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 45 its peculiar coloration is probably in actual fact of hardly the slightest service to it from the “protective” standpoint, whether as regards escaping from its enemies or approach- ing its prey. It has extraordinary facility in hiding, it is a master of the art of stealthy approach; but it is normally nocturnal and by night the color of its hide is of no conse- quence whatever; while by day, as I have already said, its varied coloration renders it slightly more easy to detect than is the case with the cougar. All of this applies with peculiar force to the zebra, which it has also been somewhat the fashion of recent years to hold up as an example of “protective coloration.” As a matter of fact the zebra’s coloration is not protective at all; on the contrary it is exceedingly conspicuous, and under the actual conditions of the zebra’s life probably never hides it from its foes; the instances to the contrary being due to conditions so exceptional that they may be disregarded. If any man seriously regards the zebra’s coloration as “‘protective,” let him try the experiment of wearing a hunting suit of the zebra pattern; he will speed- ily be undeceived. The zebra is peculiarly a beast of the open plains, and makes no effort ever to hide from the observation of its foes. It is occasionally found in open forest; and may there now and then escape observation simply as any animal of any color—a dun hartebeest or a nearly black bushbuck—may escape observation. At a distance of over a few hundred yards the zebra’s coloration ceases to be conspicuous simply because the distance has caused it to lose all its distinctive character—that is, all the quality which could possibly make it protective. Near by it is always very conspicuous, and if the conditions are 46 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS such that any animal can be seen at all, a zebra will catch the eye much more quickly than a Grant’s gazelle, for in- stance. These gazelles, by the way, although much less conspicuously colored than the zebra, bear when young, and the females even when adult, the dark side stripe which characterizes all sexes and ages of the smaller gazelle, the ‘‘tommy”; it is a very conspicuous marking, quite inexplicable on any theory of protective coloration. The truth is that no game of the plains is helped in any way by its coloration in evading its foes and none seeks to escape the vision of its foes. The larger game animals of the plains are always walking and standing in conspicuous places, and never seek to hide or take advantage of cover; while, on the contrary, the little grass and bush antelopes, like the duiker and steinbuck, trust very much to their power of hiding, and endeavor to escape the sight of their foes by lying absolutely still, in the hope of not being made out against their background. On the plains one sees the wildebeest farthest off and with most ease; the zebra and hartebeest next; the gazelles last. The wildebeest are very wary. While the hunter is still a long way off the animal will stop grazing and stand with head raised, the heavy shoulders and short neck mak- ing it unmistakable. Then, when it makes up its mind to allow no closer approach, it brandishes its long tail, springs and plunges, runs once or twice in semicircles, and is off, the head held much lower than the shoulders, the tail still lashing; and now and then a bull may toss up the dust with its horns. The herds of cows and calves usually con- tain one or two or more bulls; and in addition, dotted here and there over the plain, are single bulls or small parties of SS ee SS ee ee ee ee ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 47 bulls, usually past their prime or not yet full grown. These bulls are often found in the company of hartebeests or zebras; and stray zebras and hartebeests are often found with the wildebeest herds. The stomachs of those I opened contained nothing but grass; they are grazers, not browsers. The hartebeest are much faster, and if really frightened speedily leave their clumsy-looking friends behind; but the wildebeest, as I have seen them, are by far the most wary. The wildebeest and zebra seemed to me to lie down less freely than the hartebeest; but I frequently came on herds of both lying down during the heat of the day. Some- times part of the herd will stand drowsily erect and the rest lie down. Near Kitanga there were three wildebeest which were usually found with a big herd of hartebeest, and which regularly every afternoon lay down for some hours, just as their friends did. The animal has a very bovine look; and though called an antelope it is quite as close kin to the oxen as it is to many of the other beasts also called antelope. The fact is that antelope is not an exact term at all, but merely means any hollow-horned ruminant which the observer happens to think is not a sheep, goat, or ox. When, with Linnzus, the first serious effort at the systematization of living nature began, men naturally groped in the effort to see correctly and to ex- press what they saw. When they came to describe the hollow-horned ruminants, they, of course, already had names at hand for anything that looked like one of the domestic creatures with which they were familiar; and as “antelope” was also already a name of general, though vague, currency for some wild creatures, they called every- thing an antelope that did not seem to come in one of the 48 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS more familiar domestic categories. Study has shown that sheep and goats grade into one another among the wild species; and the so-called antelopes include forms differing from one another quite as sharply as any of them differ from their kinsfolk that are represented in the farmyard. Zebra share with hartebeest the distinction of being the most abundant game animal on the plains, throughout the whole Athi region. The two creatures are fond of as- sociating together, usually in mixed herds; but some- times there will merely be one or two individuals of one species in a big herd of the other. They are sometimes, though less frequently than the hartebeest, found in open bush country; but they live in the open plains by choice. I could not find out that they had fixed times for rest- ing, feeding, and going to water. They and the harte- beests formed the favorite prey of the numerous lions of the neighborhood; and I believe that the nights, even the moonlight nights, were passed by both animals under a nervous strain of apprehension, ever dreading the attack of their arch enemy, and stampeding from it. Their stam- pedes cause the utmost exasperation to the settlers, for when in terror of the real or imaginary attack of a lion, their mad, heedless rush takes them through a wire fence as if it were made of twine and pasteboard. But a few months before my arrival a mixed herd of zebra and harte- beest, stampeded either by lions or wild dogs, rushed through the streets of Nairobi, several being killed by the inhabitants, and one of the victims falling just outside the Episcopal Church. The zebras are nearly powerless when seized by lions; but they are bold creatures against less formidable foes, trusting in their hoofs and their strong i i le ii gE a aay ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 49 jaws; they will, when in a herd, drive off hyena or wild dogs, and will turn on hounds, if the hunter is not near. If the lion is abroad in the daytime, they, as well as the other game, seem to realize that he cannot run them down; and though they follow his movements with great alertness, and keep at a respectful distance, they show no panic. Or- dinarily, as I saw them, they did not seem very shy of men; but in this respect all the game displayed the widest differ- ences, from time to time, without any real cause, that I could discern, for the difference. At one hour, or on one day, the zebra and hartebeest would flee from our approach when half a mile off; and again they would permit us to come within a couple of hundred yards, before moving slowly away. On two or three occasions at lunch herds of zebra remained for half an hour watching us with much curiosity not over a hun- dred yards off. Once, when we had been vainly beating for lions at the foot of the Elukania ridge, at least a thousand zebras stood, in herds, on every side of us, throughout lunch; they were from two to four hundred yards distant, and I was especially struck by the fact that those which were to leeward and had our wind were no more alarmed than the others. I have seen them water at dawn and sun- set, and also in the middle of the day; and I have seen them grazing at every hour of the day, although I believe most freely in the morning and evening. At noon and until the late afternoon those I saw were quite apt to be resting, either standing or lying down. ‘They are noisy. Harte- beests merely snort or sneeze now and then; but the shrill, querulous barking of the “‘bonte quaha,”’ as the Boers call the zebra, is one of the common sounds of the African plains, both by day and night. It is usually represented in books by 50 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS the syllables ‘‘qua-ha-ha”’; but of course our letters and syl- lables were not made to represent, and can only in arbitrary and conventional fashion represent, the calls of birds and mammals; the bark of the bonte quagga or common zebra could just as well be represented by the syllables ‘‘ba-wa- wa,” and as a matter of fact it can readily be mistaken for the bark of a shrill-voiced dog. After one of a herd has been killed by a lion or a hunter its companions are par- ticularly apt to keep uttering their cry. Zebras are very beautiful creatures, and it was an unending pleasure to watch them. I never molested them save to procure speci- mens for the museums, or food for the porters, who like their rather rank flesh. They were covered with ticks like the other game; on the groin, and many of the tender- est spots, the odious creatures were in solid clusters; yet the zebras were all in high condition, with masses of oily yellow fat. One stallion weighed six hundred and fifty pounds. The hartebeest—Coke’s hartebeest, known locally by the Swahili name of kongoni—were at least as plentiful, and almost as tame as the zebras. As with the other game of equatorial Africa, we found the young of all ages; there seems to be no especial breeding time, and no one period among the males corresponding to the rutting season among northern animals. The hartebeests were usually insepara- ble companions of the zebra; but though they were by pref- erence beasts of the bare plain, they were rather more often found in open bush than were their striped friends. There are in the country numerous ant-hills, which one sees in every stage of development, from a patch of bare earth with a few funnel-like towers, to a hillock a dozen feet high and as many yards in circumference. On these big ant- E. OREN ERROR ng gy neh ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 51 hills one or two kongoni will often post themselves as look- outs, and are then almost impossible to approach. The bulls sometimes fight hard among themselves, and although their horns are not very formidable weapons, yet I knew of one case in which a bull was killed in such a duel, his chest being ripped open by his adversary’s horns; and now and then a bull will kneel and grind its face and horns into the dust or mud. Often a whole herd will gather around and on an ant-hill, or even a small patch of level ground, and make it a regular stamping ground, treading it into dust with their sharp hoofs. They have another habit which I have not seen touched on in the books. Ordinarily their droppings are scattered anywhere on the plain; but again and again I found where hartebeests—and more rarely Grant’s gazelles—had in large numbers deposited their droppings for some time in one spot. Hartebeest are homely creatures, with long faces, high withers, and show- ing when first in motion a rather ungainly gait, but they are among the swiftest and most enduring of antelope, and when at speed their action is easy and regular. When pursued by a dog they will often play before him—just as a tommy will—taking great leaps, with all four legs in- clined backward, evidently in a spirit of fun and derision. In the stomachs of those I killed, as in those of the zebras, I found only grass and a few ground plants; even in the open bush or thinly wooded country they seemed to graze and not browse. One fat and heavy bull weighed 340 pounds; a very old bull, with horns much worn down 299; and a cow in high condition 315. The Grant’s gazelle is the most beautiful of all these plains creatures; it is about the size of a big whitetail deer; 52 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS one heavy buck which I shot, although with poor horns, weighed 171 pounds. The finest among the old bucks have beautiful lyre-shaped horns, over two feet long, and their proud, graceful carriage and lightness of movement render them a delight to the eye. As I have already said, the young and the females have the dark side stripe which marks all the tommies; but the old bucks lack this, and their color fades into the brown or sandy of the dry plains far more completely than is the case with zebra or kongoni. Like the other game of the plains they are sometimes found in small parties, or else in fair-sized herds, by themselves, and sometimes with other beasts; I have seen a single fine buck in a herd of several hundred zebra and kongoni. The Thomson’s gazelles, hardly a third the weight of their larger kinsfolk, are found scattered everywhere; they are not as highly gregarious as the zebra and kongoni, and are not found in such big herds; but their little bands—now a buck and several does, now a couple of does with their fawns, now three or four bucks together, now a score of individuals—are scattered everywhere on the flats. Like the Grants, their flesh is delicious, and they seem to have much the same habits. But they have one very marked characteristic: their tails keep up an incessant nervous twitching, never being still for more than a few seconds at a time, while the larger gazelle in this part of its range rarely moves its tail at all. They are grazers and they feed, rest, and go to water at irregular times, or at least at different times in different localities; and although they are most apt to rest during the heat of the day, I have seen them get up soon after noon, having lain down for a couple of hours, feed for an hour or so, and then lie down ———— a OG pty 4 a — /—* = _ = a - = ER rake i Gree Rete Tt een a et eo ete Rete es ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 53 again. In the same way the habits of the game as to mi- gration vary with the different districts, in Africa as in America. There are places where all the game, perhaps notably the wildebeests, gather in herds of thousands, at certain times, and travel for scores of miles, so that a dis- trict which is teeming with game at one time may be almost barren of large wild life at another. But my information was that around the Kapiti Plains there was no such com- plete and extensive shift. If the rains are abundant and the grass rank, most of the game will be found far out in the middle of the plains; if, as was the case at the time of my visit, there has been a long drought—the game will be found ten or fifteen miles away, near or among the foot- hills. Unless there was something special on, like a lion- or rhinoceros-hunt, I usually rode off followed only by my sais and gun-bearers. I cannot describe the beauty and the unceasing interest of these rides, through the teeming herds of game. It was like retracing the steps of time for sixty or seventy years, and being back in the days of Corn- wallis Harris and Gordon Cumming, in the palmy times of the giant fauna of South Africa. On Pease’s own farm one day I passed through scores of herds of the beautiful and wonderful wild creatures I have spoken of above; all told there were several thousands of them. With the ex- ception of the wildebeest, most of them were not shy, and I could have taken scores of shots at a distance of a couple of hundred yards or thereabout. Of course, I did not shoot at anything unless we were out of meat or needed the skin for the collection; and when we took the skin we almost always took the meat too, for the porters, although they 54 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS had their rations of rice, depended for much of their well- being on our success with the rifle. These rides through the wild, lonely country, with only my silent black followers, had a peculiar charm. When the sky was overcast it was cool and pleasant, for it is a high country; as soon as the sun appeared the vertical tropic rays made the air quiver above the scorched land. As we passed down a hillside we brushed through aromatic shrubs and the hot, pleasant fragrance enveloped us. When we came to a nearly dry watercourse, there would be beds of rushes, beautiful lilies and lush green plants with staring flowers; and great deep-green fig-trees, or flat-topped mimosas. In many of these trees there were sure to be native beehives; these were sections of hollow logs hung from the branches; they formed striking and characteristic features of the land- scape. Wherever there was any moisture there were flow- ers, brilliant of hue and many of them sweet of smell; and birds of numerous kinds abounded. When we left the hills and the wooded watercourses we might ride hour after hour across the barren desolation of the flats, while herds of zebra and hartebeest stared at us through the heat haze. Then the zebra, with shrill, barking neighs, would file off across the horizon, or the high-withered hartebeests, snort- ing and bucking, would rush off in a confused mass, as unreasoning panic succeeded foolish confidence. If I shot anything, vultures of several kinds, and the tall, hideous marabout storks, gathered before the skinners were through with their work; they usually stayed at a wary distance, but the handsome ravens, glossy-hued with white napes, big-billed, long-winged, and short-tailed, came round more familiarly. ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 55 I rarely had to take the trouble to stalk anything; the shooting was necessarily at rather long range, but by ma- neeuvring a little, and never walking straight toward a beast, I was usually able to get whatever the naturalists wished. Sometimes I shot fairly well, and sometimes badly. On one day, for instance, the entry in my diary ran: ‘ Missed steinbuck, pig, impalla and Grant; awful.” On another day it ran in part as follows: ‘Out with Heller. Harte- beest, 250 yards, facing me; shot through face, broke neck. Zebra, very large, quartering, 160 yards, between neck and shoulder. Buck Grant, 220 yards, walking, behind shoulder. Steinbuck, 180 yards, standing, behind shoulder.” Generally each head of game bagged cost me a goodly number of bullets; but only twice did I wound animals which I failed to get; in the other cases the extra cartridges represented either misses at animals which got clean away untouched, or else a running fusillade at wounded animals which I eventually got. I am a very strong believer in making sure, and, therefore, in shooting at a wounded ani- mal as long as there is the least chance of its getting off. The expenditure of a few cartridges is of no consequence whatever compared to the escape of a single head of game which should have been bagged. Shooting at long range necessitates much running. Some of my successful shots at Grant’s gazelle and kongoni were made at 300, 350, and 400 yards; but at such distances my proportion of misses was very large indeed—and there were altogether too many even at shorter ranges. The so-called grass antelopes, the steinbuck and duiker, were the ones at which I shot worst; they were quite plen- tiful, and they got up close, seeking to escape observation 56 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS by hiding until the last moment; but they were small, and when they did go they rushed half hidden through the grass and in and out among the bushes at such a speed, and with such jumps and twists and turns, that I found it well-nigh impossible to hit them with the rifle. The few I got were generally shot when they happened to stand still. On the steep, rocky, bush-clad hills there were little klipspringers and the mountain reedbuck or Chanler’s reed- buck, a very pretty little creature. Usually we found the reedbuck does and their fawns in small parties, and the bucks by themselves; but we saw too few to enable us to tell whether this represented their normal habits. They fed on the grass, the hill plants, and the tips of certain of the shrubs, and were true mountaineers in their love of the rocks and rough ground, to which they fled in frantic haste when alarmed. ‘They were shy and elusive little things, but not wary in the sense that some of the larger antelopes are wary. I shot two does with three bullets, all of which hit. Then I tried hard for a buck; at last, late one evening, I got up to one feeding on a steep hillside, and actually took ten shots to kill him, hitting him no less than seven times. , Occasionally we drove a ravine or a range of hills by means of beaters. On such occasions all kinds of things were put up. Most of the beaters, especially if they were wild savages impressed for the purpose from some neigh- boring tribe, carried throwing-sticks, with which they were very expert; as indeed were some of the colonials, like the Hills. Hares, looking and behaving much like small jack- rabbits, were plentiful both on the plains and in the ra- vines, and dozens of these were knocked over; while on ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 57 several occasions I saw francolins and spurfowl cut down on the wing by a throwing-stick hurled from some un- usually dexterous hand. The beats, with the noise and laughter of the good-hu- mored, excitable savages, and the alert interest as to what would turn up next, were great fun; but the days I enjoyed most were those spent alone with my horse and gun-bearers. We might be off by dawn, and see the tropic sun flame splendid over the brink of the world; strange creatures rustled through the bush or fled dimly through the long grass, before the light grew bright; and the air was fresh and sweet as it blew in our faces. When the still heat of noon drew near I would stop under a tree, with my water canteen and my lunch. The men lay in the shade, and the hobbled pony grazed close by, while I either dozed or else watched through my telescope the herds of game lying down or standing drowsily in the distance. As the shadows lengthened I would again mount, and finally ride home- ward as the red sunset paled to amber and opal, and all the vast, mysterious African landscape grew to wonderful beauty in the dying twilight. CHAPTER III LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS Tue dangerous game of Africa are the lion, buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, and leopard. The hunter who fol- lows any of these animals always does so at a certain risk to life or limb; a risk which it is his business to minimize by coolness, caution, good judgment, and straight shooting. The leopard is in point of pluck and ferocity more than the equal of the other four; but his small size always renders it likely that he will merely maul, and not kill, a man. My friend, Carl Akeley, of Chicago, actually killed bare- handed a leopard which sprang on him. He had already wounded the beast twice, crippling it in one front and one hind paw; whereupon it charged, followed him as he tried to dodge the charge, and struck him full just as he turned. It bit him in one arm, biting again and again as it worked up the arm from the wrist to the elbow; but Akeley threw it, holding its throat with the other hand, and flinging its body to one side. It luckily fell on its side with its two wounded legs uppermost, so that it could not tear him. He fell for- ward with it and crushed in its chest with his knees until he distinctly felt one of its ribs crack; this, said Akeley, was the first moment when he felt he might conquer. Re- doubling his efforts, with knees and hand, he actually choked and crushed the life out of it, although his arm was badly bitten. A leopard will charge at least as readily as 58 LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 59 one of the big beasts, and is rather more apt to get his charge home, but the risk is less to life than to limb. There are other animals often or occasionally danger- ous to human life which are, nevertheless, not dangerous to the hunter. Crocodiles are far greater pests, and far more often man-eaters, than lions or leopards; but their shooting is not accompanied by the smallest element of risk. Poisonous snakes are fruitful sources of accident, but they are actuated only by fear, and the anger born of fear. The hippopotamus sometimes destroys boats and kills those in them; but again there is no risk in hunting him. Finally, the hyena, too cowardly ever to be a source of danger to the hunter, is sometimes a dreadful curse to the weak and helpless. The hyena is a beast of unusual. strength, and of enormous power in his jaws and teeth, and thrice over would he be dreaded were fang and sinew driven by a heart of the leopard’s cruel courage. But though the creature’s foul and evil ferocity has no such backing as that yielded by the angry daring of the spotted cat, it is yet fraught with a terror all its own; for on oc- casion the hyena takes to man-eating after its own fashion. Carrion-feeder though it is, in certain places it will enter native huts and carry away children or even sleeping adults; and where famine or disease has worked havoc among a people, the hideous spotted beasts become bolder and prey on the survivors. For some years past Uganda has been scourged by the sleeping sickness, which has ravaged it as in the Middle Ages the Black Death ravaged Europe. Hundreds of thousands of natives have died. Every effort has been made by the Government officials to cope with the disease; and among other things sleeping-sickness 60 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS camps have been established, where those stricken by the dread malady can be isolated and cease to be possible sources of infection to their fellows. Recovery among those stricken is so rare as to be almost unknown, but the disease is often slow, and months may elapse during which the diseased man is still able to live his life much as usual. In the big camps of doomed men and women thus estab- lished there were, therefore, many persons carrying on their avocations much as in an ordinary native village. But the hyenas speedily found that in many of the huts the inmates were a helpless prey. In 1908 and throughout the early part of 1909 they grew constantly bolder, haunt- ing these sleeping-sickness camps, and each night enter- ing them, bursting into the huts and carrying off and eating the dying people. To guard against them each little group of huts was inclosed by a thick hedge; but after a while the hyenas learned to break through the hedges, and con- tinued their ravages; so that every night armed sentries had to patrol the camps, and every night they could be heard fir- ing at the marauders. The men thus preyed on were sick to death, and for the most part helpless. But occasionally men-in full vigor are attacked. One of Pease’s native hunters was seized by a hyena as he slept beside the camp-fire, and part of his face torn off. Selous informed me that a friend of his, Major R. T. Coryndon, then administrator of Northwestern Rhodesia, was attacked by a hyena but two or three years ago. At the time Major Coryndon was lying, wrapped in a blanket, beside his wagon. A hyena, stealthily approach- ing through the night, seized him by the hand, and dragged him out of bed; but as he struggled and called out, the LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 61 beast left him and ran off into the darkness. In spite of his torn hand the major was determined to get his assailant, which he felt sure would soon return. Accordingly, he went back to his bed, drew his cocked rifle beside him, pointing toward his feet, and feigned sleep. When all was still once more, a dim form loomed up through the uncertain light, toward the foot of the bed; it was the rav- enous beast returning for his prey; and the major shot and killed it where it stood. A few months ago a hyena entered the outskirts of Nairobi, crept into a hut, and seized and killed a native man. At Nairobi the wild creatures are always at the threshold of the town, and often cross it. At Governor Jackson’s table, at Government House, I met Mr. and Mrs. Sandiford. Mr. Sandiford is managing the railroad. A few months previously, while he was sitting, with his family, in his own house in Nairobi, he happened to ask his daughter to look for something in one of the bedrooms. She returned in a minute, quietly remarking, ‘Father, there’s a leopard under the bed.” So there was; and it was then remembered that the house-cat had been showing a marked and alert distrust of the room in question—very probably the leopard had gotten into the house while try- ing to catch her or one of the dogs. A neighbor with a rifle was summoned, and shot the leopard. Hyenas not infrequently kill mules and donkeys, tear- ing open their bellies, and eating them while they are still alive. Yet when themselves assailed they usually behave with abject cowardice. The Hills had a large Airedale terrier, an energetic dog of much courage. Not long before our visit this dog put up a hyena from a bushy ravine, in 62 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS broad daylight, ran after it, overtook it, and flew at it. The hyena made no effective fight, although the dog—not a third its weight—bit it severely, and delayed its flight so that it was killed. During the first few weeks of our trip I not infrequently heard hyenas after nightfall, but saw none. Kermit, however, put one out of a ravine or dry creek-bed—a donga, as it is locally called—and though the brute had a long start he galloped after it and succeeded in running it down. ‘The chase was a long one, for twice the hyena got in such rocky country that he almost distanced his pursuer; but at last, after covering nearly ten miles, Kermit ran into it in the open, shooting it from the saddle as it shambled along at a canter growling with rage and terror. I would not have recognized the cry of the hyenas from what I had read, and it was long before I heard them laugh. Pease said that he had only once heard them really laugh. On that occasion he was watching for lions outside a Somali zareba. Suddenly a leopard leaped clear over the zareba, close beside him, and in a few seconds came flying back again, over the high thorn fence, with a sheep in its mouth; but no sooner had it landed than the hyenas rushed at it and took away the sheep; and then their cack- ling and shrieking sounded exactly like the most unpleasant kind of laughter. The normal death of very old lions, as they grow starved and feeble—unless they are previously killed in an encounter with dangerous game like buffalo— is to be killed and eaten by hyenas; but of course a lion in full vigor pays no heed to hyenas, unless it is to kill one if it gets in the way. During the last few decades, in Africa, hundreds of white hunters, and thousands of native hunters, have been © LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 638 killed or wounded by lions, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos. All are dangerous game; each species has to its grewsome credit a long list of mighty hunters slain or disabled. Among those competent to express judgment there is the widest difference of opinion as to the comparative danger in hunt- ing the several kinds of animals. Probably no other hunter who has ever lived has combined Selous’s experience with his skill as a hunter and his power of accurate observation and narration. He has killed between three and four hundred lions, elephants, buffaloes, and rhinos, and he ranks the lion as much the most dangerous, and the rhino as much the least, while he puts the buffalo and elephant in between, and practically on a par. Governor Jackson has killed between eighty and ninety of the four animals; and he puts the buffalo unquestionably first in point of for- midable capacity as a foe, the elephant equally unques- tionably second, the lion third, and the rhino last. Stigand puts them in the following order: lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, and buffalo. Drummond, who wrote a capital book on South African game, who was for years a pro- fessional hunter like Selous, and who had fine opportunities for observation, but who was a much less accurate observer than Selous, put the rhino as unquestionably the most dan- gerous, with the lion as second, and the buffalo and elephant nearly on a level. Samuel Baker, a mighty hunter and good observer, but with less experience of African game than any one of the above, put the elephant first, the rhino second, the buffalo seemingly third, and the lion last. The experts of greatest experience thus absolutely disagree among them- selves; and there is the same wide divergence of view among good hunters and trained observers whose oppor- 64 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS tunities have been less. Mr. Abel Chapman, for instance, regards both the elephant and the rhino as more danger- ous than the lion; and many of the hunters I met in East Africa seemed inclined to rank the buffalo as more danger- ous than any other animal. A man who has shot but a dozen or a score of these various animals, all put together, is not entitled to express any but the most tentative opinion as to their relative prowess and ferocity; yet on the whole it seems to me that the weight of opinion among those best fitted to judge is that the lion is the most formidable op- ponent of the hunter, under ordinary conditions. This is my own view. But we must ever keep in mind the fact that the surrounding conditions, the geographical locality, and the wide individual variation of temper within the ranks of each species, must all be taken into account. Under certain circumstances a lion may be easily killed, whereas a rhino would be a dangerous foe. Under other conditions the rhino could be attacked with impunity, and the lion only with the utmost hazard; and one bull buffalo might flee and one bull elephant charge, and yet the next couple met with might show an exact reversal of behavior. At any rate, during the last three or four years, in Ger- man and British East Africa and Uganda, over fifty white men have been killed or mauled by lions, buffaloes, elephants, and rhinos; and the lions have much the largest list of victims to their credit. In Nairobi church-yard I was shown the graves of seven men who had been killed by lions, and of one who had been killed by a rhino. The first man to meet us on the African shore was Mr. Campbell, Gov- ernor Jackson’s A.D.C., and only a year previously he had been badly mauled by a lion. We met one gentleman who 7 LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 65 had been crippled for life by a lioness. He had marked her into some patches of brush, and coming up, tried to put her out of one thick clump. Failing, he thought she might have gone into another thicket, and walked toward it; instantly that his back was turned, the lioness, who had really been in the first clump of brush, raced out after him, threw him down, and bit him again and again before she was driven off. One night we camped at the very spot where, a score of years before, a strange tragedy had hap- pened. It was in the early days of the opening of the coun- try, and an expedition was going toward Uganda; one of the officials in charge was sleeping in a tent with the flap open. There was an askari on duty; yet a lion crept up, entered the tent, and seized and dragged forth the man. He struggled and made outcry; there was a rush of people, and the lion dropped his prey and bounded off. The man’s wounds were dressed, and he was put back to bed in his own tent; but an hour or two after the camp again grew still, the lion returned, bent on the victim of whom he had been robbed; he re-entered the tent, seized the unfortu- nate wounded man with his great fangs, and this time made off with him into the surrounding darkness, killed and ate him. Not far from the scene of this tragedy, another had occurred. An English officer named Stewart, while endeavoring to kill his first lion, was himself set on and slain. At yet another place we were shown where two settlers, Messrs. Lucas and Goldfinch, had been one killed and one crippled by a lion they had been hunting. They had been following the chase on horseback, and being men of bold nature, and having killed several lions, had become _ too daring. They hunted the lion into a small piece of 66 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS brush and rode too near it. It came out at a run and was on them before their horses could get under way. Gold- finch was knocked over and badly bitten and clawed; Lu- cas went to his assistance, and was in his turn knocked over, and the lion then lay on him and bit him to death. Goldfinch, in spite of his own severe wounds, crawled over and shot the great beast as it lay on his friend. Most of the settlers with whom I was hunting had met with various adventures in connection with lions. Sir Alfred had shot many in different parts of Africa; some had charged fiercely, but he always stopped them. Cap- tain Slatter had killed a big male with a mane a few months previously. He was hunting it in company with Mr. Hum- phery, the District Commissioner of whom I have already spoken, and it gave them some exciting moments, for when hit it charged savagely. Humphery had a shot-gun loaded with buckshot, Slatter his rifle. When wounded, the lion charged straight home, hit Slatter, knocking him flat and rolling him over and over in the sand, and then went after the native gun-bearer, who was running away—the worst possible course to follow with a charging lion. The mech- anism of Slatter’s rifle was choked by the sand, and as he rose to his feet he saw the lion overtake the fleeing man, rise on his hind legs like a rearing horse—not springing— and strike down the fugitive. Humphery fired into him with buckshot, which merely went through the skin; and some minutes elapsed before Slatter was able to get his rifle in shape to kill the lion, which, fortunately, had be- gun to feel the effect of his wounds, and was too sick to re- sume hostilities of its own accord. The gun-bearer was badly but not fatally injured. Before this, Slatter, while LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 67 on a lion hunt, had been set afoot by one of the animals he was after, which had killed his horse. It was at night and the horse was tethered within six yards of his sleeping master. The latter was aroused by the horse galloping off, and he heard it staggering on for some sixty yards before it fell. He and his friend followed it with lanterns and drove off the lion, but the horse was dead. The tracks and the marks on the horse showed what had happened. The lion had sprung clean on the horse’s back, his fore claws dug into the horse’s shoulders, his hind claws cutting into its haunches, while the great fangs bit at the neck. The horse struggled off at a heavy run, carrying its fearsome burden. After going some sixty yards the lion’s teeth went through the spinal cord, and the ride was over. Neither animal had made a sound, and the lion’s feet did not touch the earth until the horse fell. While a magistrate in the Transvaal, Pease had under him as game officer a white hunter, a fine fellow, who under- went an extraordinary experience. He had been off some distance with his Kaffir boys, to hunt a lion. On his way home the hunter was hunted. It was after nightfall. He had reached a region where lions had not been seen for a long time, and where an attack by them was unknown. He was riding along a trail in the darkness, his big boar- hound trotting ahead, his native “boys” some distance behind. He heard a rustle in the bushes alongside the path, but paid no heed, thinking it was a reedbuck. Im- mediately afterward two lions came out in the path behind and raced after him. One sprang on him, tore him out of the saddle, and trotted off holding him in its mouth, while the other continued after the frightened horse. The lion 68 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS had him by the right shoulder, and yet with his left hand he wrenched his knife out of his belt and twice stabbed it. The second stab went to the heart and the beast let go of him, stood a moment, and fell dead. Meanwhile, the dog had followed the other lion, which now, having abandoned the chase of the horse, and with the dog still at his heels, came trotting back to look for the man. Crippled though he was, the hunter managed to climb a small tree; and though the lion might have gotten him out of it, the dog interfered. Whenever the lion came toward the tree the dog worried him, and kept him off until, at the shouts and torches of the approaching Kaffir boys, he sullenly retired, and the hunter was rescued. Percival had a narrow escape from a lion, which nearly got him, though probably under a misunderstanding. He was riding through a wet spot of ground, where the grass was four feet high, when his horse suddenly burst into a run and the next moment a lion had galloped almost along- side of him. Probably the lion thought it was a zebra, for when Percival, leaning over, yelled in his face, the lion stopped short. But he at once came on again, and nearly caught the horse. However, they were now out of the tall grass, and the lion gradually drew up when they reached the open country. The two Hills, Clifford and Harold, were running an ostrich-farm. The lions sometimes killed their ostriches and stock; and the Hills in return had killed several lions. The Hills were fine fellows; Africanders, as their fore- fathers for three generations had been, and frontiersmen of the best kind. From the first moment they and I became fast friends, for we instinctively understood one another, LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS — 69 and found that we felt alike on all the big questions, and looked at life, and especially the life of effort led by the pioneer settler, from the same stand-point. They reminded me, at every moment, of those Western ranchmen and home- makers with whom I have always felt a special sense of com- panionship and with whose ideals and aspirations I have always felt a special sympathy. A couple of months before my visit, Harold Hill had met with a rather unpleasant adventure. He was walking home across the lonely plains, in the broad daylight, never dreaming that lions might be abroad, and was unarmed. When still some miles from his house, while plodding along, he glanced up and saw three lions in the trail only fifty yards off, staring fixedly at him. It happened to be a place where the grass was rather tall, and lions are always bold where there is the slightest cover; whereas, unless angered, they are cautious on bare ground. He halted, and then walked slowly to one side; and then slowly forward toward his house. The lions followed him with their eyes, and when he had passed they rose and slouched after him. ‘They were not pleasant followers, but to hurry would have been fatal; and he walked slowly on along the road, while for a mile he kept catching glimpses of the tawny bodies of the beasts as they trod stealthily forward through the sunburned grass, alongside or a little behind him. Then the grass grew short, and the lions halted and continued to gaze after him until he dis- appeared over a rise. ; Everywhere throughout the country we were crossing were signs that the lion was lord and that his reign was cruel. There were many lions, for the game on which they feed was extraordinarily abundant. They occasionally took 70 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS the ostriches or stock of the settlers, or ravaged the herds and flocks of the natives, but not often; for their favor- ite food was yielded by the swarming herds of kongoni and zebras, on which they could prey at will. Later we found that in this region they rarely molested the buffalo, even where they lived in the same reedbeds; and this though elsewhere they habitually prey on the buffalo. But where zebras and hartebeests could be obtained without effort, it was evidently not worth their while to challenge such formidable quarry. Every “kill” I saw was a kongoni or a zebra; probably I came across fifty of each. One zebra kill, which was not more than eighteen hours old (after the lapse of that time the vultures and marabouts, not to speak of the hyenas and jackals, leave only the bare bones), showed just what had occurred. “The bones were all in place, and the skin still on the lower legs and head. The animal was lying on its belly, the legs spread out, the neck vertebra crushed; evidently the lion had sprung clean on it, bearing it down by his weight while he bit through the back of the neck, and the zebra’s legs had spread out as the body yielded under the lion. One fresh kongoni kill showed no marks on the haunches, but a broken neck and claw marks on the face and withers; in this case the lion’s hind legs had remained on the ground, while with his fore paws he grasped the kongoni’s head and shoulders, holding it until the teeth splintered the neck bone. One or two of our efforts to get lions failed, of course; the ravines we beat did not contain them, or we failed to make them leave some particularly difficult hill or swamp— for lions lie close. But Sir Alfred knew just the right place to go to, and was bound to get us lions—and he did. LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 71 One day we started from the ranch house in good sea- son for an all-day lion hunt. Besides Kermit and myself, there was a fellow-guest, Medlicott, and not only our host, but our hostess and her daughter; and we were joined by Percival at lunch, which we took under a great fig-tree, at the foot of a high, rocky hill. Percival had with him a little mongrel bull-dog, and a Masai “boy,” a fine, bold-looking savage, with a handsome head-dress and the usual formidable spear; master, man, and dog evidently all looked upon any form of encounter with lions simply in the light of a spree. After lunch we began to beat down a long donga, or dry watercourse—a creek, as we should call it in the Western plains country. ‘The watercourse, with low, steep banks, wound in curves, and here and there were patches of brush, which might contain anything in the shape of lion, chee- tah, hyena, or wild dog. Soon we came upon lion spoor in the sandy bed; first the footprints of a big male, then those of a lioness. We walked cautiously along each side of the donga, the horses following close behind so that if the lion were missed we could gallop after him and round him up on the plain. The dogs—for besides the little bull, we had a large brindled mongrel named Ben, whose courage belied his looks—began to show signs of scenting the lion; and we beat out each patch of brush, the natives shouting and throwing in stones, while we stood with the rifles where we could best command any probable exit. After a couple of false alarms the dogs drew toward one patch, their hair bristling, and showing such eager excitement that it was evident something big was inside; and in a moment one of the boys called, “simba” (lion), and pointed with his fin- ger. It was just across the little ravine, there about four 72 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS yards wide and as many feet deep; and I shifted my posi- tion, peering eagerly into the bushes for some moments before I caught a glimpse of tawny hide; as it moved, there was a call to me to “‘shoot,” for at that distance, if the lion charged, there would be scant time to stop it; and I fired into what I saw. There was a commotion in the bushes, and Kermit fired; and immediately afterward there broke out on the other side, not the hoped-for big lion, but two cubs the size of mastiffs. Each was badly wounded and we finished them off; even if unwounded, they were too big to take alive. This was a great disappointment, and as it was well on in the afternoon, and we had beaten the country most apt to harbor our game, it seemed unlikely that we would have another chance. Percival was on foot and a long way from his house, so he started for it; and the rest of us also began to jog homeward. But Sir Alfred, although he said nothing, intended to have another try. After going a mile or two he started off to the left at a brisk canter; and we, the other riders, followed, leaving behind our gun-bearers, saises, and porters. A couple of miles away was another donga, another shallow watercourse with occasional big brush patches along the winding bed; and toward this we cantered. Almost as soon as we reached it our leader found the spoor of two big lions; and with every sense acock, we dismounted and approached the first patch of tall bushes. We shouted and threw in stones, but nothing came out; and another small patch showed the same result. ‘Then we mounted our horses again, and rode toward another patch a quarter of a mile off. I was mounted on Tran- quillity, the stout and quiet sorrel. ee ea RE eae A eh er eae LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 73 This patch of tall, thick brush stood on the hither bank—that is, on our side of the watercourse. We rode up to it and shouted loudly. The response was immediate, in the shape of loud gruntings, and crashings through the thick brush. We were off our horses in an instant, I throwing the reins over the head of mine; and without de- lay the good old fellow began placidly grazing, quite un- moved by the ominous sounds immediately in front. I sprang to one side; and for a second or two we waited, uncertain whether we should see the lions charging out ten yards distant or running away. Fortunately, they adopted the latter course. Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared, from behind the bushes which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny, galloping form of a big maneless lion. Crack! the Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with the second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and for- ward into his chest. Down he came, sixty yards off, his hind quarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, his jaws open and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn to face us. His back was broken; but of this we could not at the moment be sure, and if it had merely been grazed, he might have recovered, and then, even though dying, his charge might have done mischief. So Kermit, Sir Alfred, and I fired, almost together, into his chest. His head sank, and he died. This lion had come out on the left of the bushes; the other, to the right of them, had not been hit, and we saw him galloping off across the plain, six or eight hundred yards away. A couple more shots missed, and we mounted 74 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS our horses to try to ride him down. The plain sloped gently upward for three-quarters of a mile to a low crest or divide, and long before we got near him he disappeared over this. Sir Alfred and Kermit were tearing along in front and to the right, with Miss Pease close behind; while Tranquillity carried me, as fast as he could, on the left, with Medlicott near me. On topping the divide Sir Al- fred and Kermit missed the lion, which had swung to the left, and they raced ahead too far to the right. Medlicott and I, however, saw the lion, loping along close behind some kongoni; and this enabled me to get up to him as quickly as the lighter men on the faster horses. The going was now slightly downhill, and the sorrel took me along very well, while Medlicott, whose horse was slow, bore to the right and joined the other two men. We gained rapidly, and, finding out this, the lion suddenly halted and came to bay in a slight hollow, where the grass was rather long. The plain seemed flat, and we could see the lion well from horse- back; but, especially when he lay down, it was most difh- cult to make him out on foot, and impossible to do so when kneeling. We were about a hundred and fifty yards from the lion, Sir Alfred, Kermit, Medlicott, and Miss Pease off to one side, and slightly above him on the slope, while I was on the level, about equidistant from him and them. Kermit and I tried shooting from the horses; but at such a distance this was not effective. Then Kermit got off, but his horse would not let him shoot; and when I got off I could not make out the animal through the grass with sufficient distinctness to enable me to take aim. Old Ben the dog had arrived, and, barking loudly, was strolling about near LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 75 the lion, which paid him not the slightest attention. At this moment my black sais, Simba, came running up to me and took hold of the bridle; he had seen the chase from the line of march and had cut across to join me. ‘There was no other sais or gun-bearer anywhere near, and his action was plucky, for he was the only man afoot, with the lion at bay. Lady Pease had also ridden up and was an interested spectator only some fifty yards behind me. Now, an elderly man with a varied past which includes rheumatism does not vault lightly into the saddle; as his sons, for instance, can; and I had already made up my mind that in the event of the lion’s charging it would be wise for me to trust to straight powder rather than to try to scramble into the saddle and get under way in time. The arrival of my two companions settled matters. I was not sure of the speed of Lady Pease’s horse; and Simba was on foot and it was of course out of the question for me to leave him. So I said, “Good, Simba, now we’ll see this thing through,” and gentle-mannered Simba smiled a shy ap- preciation of my tone, though he could not understand the words. I was still unable to see the lion when I knelt, but he was now standing up, looking first at one group of horses and then at the other, his tail lashing to and fro, his head held low, and his lips dropped over his mouth in peculiar fashion, while his harsh and savage growling rolled thunderously over the plain. Seeing Simba and me on foot, he turned toward us, his tail lashing quicker and quicker. Resting my elbow on Simba’s bent shoulder, I took steady aim and pressed the trigger; the bullet went in between the neck and shoulder, and the lion fell over on his side, one foreleg in the air. He recovered ina moment 76 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS and stood up, evidently very sick, and once more faced me, growling hoarsely. I think he was on the eve of charg- ing. I fired again at once, and this bullet broke his back just behind the shoulders; and with the next I killed him outright, after we had gathered round him. These were two good-sized maneless lions; and very proud of them I was. I think Sir Alfred was at least as proud, especially because we had performed the feat alone, without any professional hunters being present. ‘‘We were all amateurs, only gentleman riders up,” said Sir Alfred. It was late before we got the lions skinned. Then we set off toward the ranch, two porters carrying each lion skin, strapped to a pole; and two others carrying the cub skins. Night fell long before we were near the ranch; but the brilliant tropic moon lighted the trail. The stalwart savages who carried the bloody lion skins swung along at a faster walk as the sun went down and the moon rose higher; and they began to chant in unison, one uttering a single word or sentence, and the others joining in a deep- toned, musical chorus. The men on a safari, and indeed African natives generally, are always excited over the death of a lion, and the hunting tribes then chant their rough hunting songs, or victory songs, until the monotonous, rhythmical repetitions make them grow almost frenzied. The ride home through the moonlight, the vast barren land- scape shining like silver on either hand, was one to be re- membered; and above all, the sight of our trophies and of their wild bearers. , _ Three days later we had another successful lion hunt. Our camp was pitched at a waterhole in a little stream called Potha, by a hill of the same name. Pease, Medlicott, LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 77 and both the Hills were with us, and Heller came too; for he liked, when possible, to be with the hunters so that he could at once care for any beast that was shot. As the safari was stationary, we took fifty or sixty porters as beat- ers. It was thirteen hours before we got into camp that evening. The Hills had with them as beaters and water- carriers half a dozen of the Wakamba who were working on their farm. It was interesting to watch these naked savages, with their filed teeth, their heads shaved in curi- ous patterns, and carrying for arms little bows and arrows. Before lunch we beat a long, low hill. Harold Hill was with me; Medlicott and Kermit were together. We placed ourselves, one couple on each side of a narrow neck, two- thirds of the way along the crest of the hill; and soon after we were in position we heard the distant shouts of the beaters as they came toward us, covering the crest and the tops of the slopes on both sides. It was rather dis- concerting to find how much better Hill’s eyes were than mine. He saw everything first, and it usually took some time before he could make me see it. In this first drive nothing came my way except some mountain reedbuck does, at which I did not shoot. But a fine male cheetah came to Kermit, and he bowled it over in good style as it ran. Then the beaters halted, and waited before resuming their march until the guns had gone clear round and es- tablished themselves at the base of the farther end of the hill. This time Kermit, who was a couple of hundred yards from me, killed a reedbuck and a steinbuck. Sud- denly Hill said, “Lion,” and endeavored to point it out to 78 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS me, as it crept cautiously among the rocks on the steep hillside, a hundred and fifty yards away. At first I could not see it; finally I thought I did and fired, but, as it proved, at a place just above him. However, it made him start up, and I immediately put the next bullet behind his shoulders; it was a fatal shot; but, growling, he struggled down the hill, and I fired again and killed him. It was not much of a trophy, however, turning out to be a half-grown male. We lunched under a tree, and then arranged for an- other beat. There was a long, wide valley, or rather a slight depression in the ground—for it was only three or four feet below the general level—in which the grass grew tall, as the soil was quite wet. It was the scene of Percival’s ad- venture with the lion that chased him. Hill and I stationed ourselves on one side of this valley or depression, toward the upper end; Pease took Kermit to the opposite side; and we waited, our horses some distance behind us. ‘The beaters were put in at the lower end, formed a line across the valley, and beat slowly toward us, making a great noise. They were still some distance away when Hill saw three lions, which had slunk stealthily off ahead of them through the grass. I have called the grass tall, but this was only by comparison with the short grass of the dry plains. In the depression or valley it was some three feet high. In such grass a lion, which is marvellously adept at hiding, can easily conceal itself, not merely when lying down, but when advancing at a crouching gait. If it stands erect, how- ever, it can be seen. There were two lions near us, one directly in our front, a hundred and ten yards off. Some seconds passed before Hill could make me realize that the dim yellow smear in LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 79 the yellow-brown grass was a lion; and then I found such difficulty in getting a bead on him that I overshot. How- ever, the bullet must have passed very close—indeed, I think it just grazed him—for he jumped up and faced us, growling savagely. Then, his head lowered, he threw his tail straight into the air and began to charge. The first few steps he took at a trot, and before he could start into a gallop I put the soft-nosed Winchester bullet in between the neck and shoulder. Down he went with a roar; the wound was fatal, but I was taking no chances, and I put two more bullets in him. Then we walked toward where Hill had already seen another lion—the lioness, as it proved. Again he had some difficulty in making me see her; but he suc- ceeded and I walked toward her through the long grass, repressing the zeal of my two gun-bearers, who were stanch, but who showed a tendency to walk a little ahead of me on each side, instead of a little behind. I walked toward her because I could not kneel to shoot in grass so tall; and when shooting off-hand I like to be fairly close, so as to be sure that my bullets go in the right place. At sixty yards I could make her out clearly, snarling at me as she faced me; and I shot her full in the chest. She at once performed a series of extraordinary antics, tumbling about on her head, just as if she were throwing somersaults, first to one side and then to the other. I fired again, but managed to shoot between the somersaults, so to speak, and missed her. The shot seemed to bring her to herself, and away she tore; but instead of charging us she charged the line of beaters. She was dying fast, however, and in her weakness failed to catch any one; and she sank down into the long grass. Hill and I advanced to look her up, our rifles at full cock, 80 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS and the gun-bearers close behind. It is ticklish work to follow a wounded lion in tall grass, and we walked carefully, every sense on the alert. We passed Heller, who had been with the beaters. He spoke to us with an amused smile. His only weapon was a pair of field-glasses, but he always took things as they came, with entire coolness, and to be close to a wounded lioness when she charged merely inter- ested him. A beater came running up and pointed toward where he had seen her, and we walked toward the place. At thirty yards distance Hill pointed, and, eagerly peering, I made out the form of the lioness showing indistinctly through the grass. She was half crouching, half sitting, her head bent down; but she still had strength to do mischief. She saw us, but before she could turn I sent a bullet through her shoulders; down she went, and was dead when we walked up. A cub had been seen, and another full-grown lion, but they had slunk off and we got neither. This was a full-grown, but young, lioness of average size; her cubs must have been several months old. We took her entire to camp to weigh; she weighed two hundred and eighty-three pounds. ‘The first lion, which we had difficulty in finding, as there were no identifying marks in the plain of tall grass, was a good-sized male, weighing about four hundred pounds, but not yet full-grown; al- though he was probably the father of the cubs. We were a long way from camp, and, after beating in vain for the other lion, we started back; it was after night- fall before we saw the camp-fires. It was two hours later before the porters appeared, bearing on poles the skin of the dead lion, and the lioness entire. —The moon was nearly full, and it was interesting to see them come swinging LION HUNTING ON THE KAPITI PLAINS 81 down the trail in the bright silver light, chanting in deep tones, over and over again, a line or phrase that sounded like: “Zou-zou-boulé ma ja guntai; zou-zou-boulé ma ja guntai.” Occasionally they would interrupt it by the repetition in unison, at short intervals, of a guttural ejaculation, sound- ing like “huzlem.” ‘They marched into camp, then up and down the lines, before the rows of small fires; then, accompanied by all the rest of the porters, they paraded up to the big fire where I was standing. Here they stopped and ended the ceremony by a minute or two’s vigorous dancing amid singing and wild shouting. The firelight gleamed and flickered across the grim dead beasts, and the shining eyes and black features of the excited savages, while all around the moon flooded the landscape with her white light. CHAPTER IV ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE Wuen we killed the last lions we were already on safari, and the camp was pitched by a waterhole on the Potha, a half-dried stream, little more than a string of pools and reedbeds, winding down through the sun-scorched plain. Next morning we started for another waterhole at the rocky hill of Bondoni, about eight miles distant. | Safari life is very pleasant, and also very picturesque. The porters are strong, patient, good-humored savages, with something childlike about them that makes one really fond of them. Of course, like all savages and most children, they have their limitations, and in dealing with them firm- ness is even more necessary than kindness; but the man is a poor creature who does not treat them with kindness also, and I am rather sorry for him if he does not grow to feel for them, and to make them in return feel for him, a real and friendly liking. They are subject to gusts of passion, and they are now and then guilty of grave misdeeds and shortcomings; sometimes for no conceivable reason, at least from the white man’s stand-point. But they are generally cheerful, and when cheerful are always amusing; and they work hard, if the white man is able to combine tact and consideration with that insistence on the performance of duty the lack of which they despise as weakness. Any little change or excitement is a source of pleasure to them. 82 ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE 83 When the march is over they sing; and after two or three days in camp they will not only sing, but dance when an- other march is to begin. Of course at times they suffer greatly from thirst and hunger and fatigue, and at times they will suddenly grow sullen or rebel without what seems to us any adequate cause; and they have an inconsequent type of mind which now and then leads them to commit follies all the more exasperating because they are against their own interest no less than against the interest of their employer. But they do well on the whole, and safari life is attractive to them. ‘They are fed well; the government requires that they be fitted with suitable clothes and given small tents, so that they are better clad and sheltered than they would be otherwise; and their wages represent money which they could get in no other way. ‘The safari repre- sents a great advantage to the porter; who in his turn alone makes the safari possible. When we were to march, camp was broken as early in the day as possible. Each man had his allotted task, and the tents, bedding, provisions, and all else were expeditiously made into suitable packages. Each porter is supposed to carry from fifty-five to sixty pounds, which may all be in one bundle or in two or three. The American flag, which flew over my tent, was a matter of much pride to the por- ters, and was always carried at the head or near the head of the line of march; and after it in single file came the long line of burden bearers. As they started, some of them would blow on horns or whistles and others beat little tomtoms; and at intervals this would be renewed again and again throughout the march; or the men might suddenly begin to chant, or merely to keep repeating in unison some 84 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS one word or one phrase which, when we asked to have it translated, might or might not prove to be entirely mean- ingless. The headmen carried no burdens, and the tent boys hardly anything, while the saises walked with the spare horses. In addition to the canonical and required costume of blouse or jersey and drawers, each porter wore a blanket, and usually something else to which his soul inclined. It might be an exceedingly shabby coat; it might be, of all things in the world, an umbrella, an article for which they had a special attachment. Often I would see a porter, who thought nothing whatever of walking for hours at midday under the equatorial sun with his head bare, trudging along with solemn pride either under an open umbrella, or carrying the umbrella (tied much like Mrs. Gamp’s) in one hand, as a wand of dignity. Then their head-gear varied according to the fancy of the indi- vidual. Normally it was a red fez, a kind of cap only used in hot climates, and exquisitely designed to be useless therein because it gives absolutely no protection from the sun. But one would wear a skin cap; another would sud- denly put one or more long feathers in his fez; and another, discarding the fez, would revert to some purely savage head-dress which he would wear with equal gravity whether it were, in our eyes, really decorative or merely comic. One such head-dress, for instance, consisted of the skin of the top of a zebra’s head, with the two ears. Another was made of the skins of squirrels, with the tails both sticking up and hanging down. Another consisted of a bunch of feathers woven into the hair, which itself was pulled out into strings that were stiffened with clay. Another was really too intricate for description because it included the ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE 85 man’s natural hair, some strips of skin, and an empty tin can. If it were a long journey and we broke it by a noonday halt, or if it were a short journey and we reached camp ahead of the safari, it was interesting to see the long file of men approach. Here and there, leading the porters, scattered through the line, or walking alongside, were the askaris, the rifle-bearing soldiers. ‘They were not marks- men, to put it mildly, and I should not have regarded them as particularly efficient allies in a serious fight; but they were excellent for police duty in camp, and were also of use in preventing collisions with the natives. After the leading askaris might come one of the headmen; one of whom, by the way, looked exactly like a Semitic negro, and always travelled with a large dirty-white umbrella in one hand; while another, a tall, powerful fellow, was a mission boy who spoke good English; I mention his being a mission boy because it is so frequently asserted that mission boys never turn out well. Then would come the man with the flag, followed by another blowing on an antelope horn, or perhaps beating an empty can as a drum; and then the long line of men, some carrying their loads on their heads, others on their shoulders, others, in a very few cases, on their backs. As they approached the halting place their spirits rose, the whistles and horns were blown, and the improvised drums beaten, and perhaps the whole line would burst into a chant. On reaching the camping ground each man at once set about his allotted task, and the tents were quickly pitched and the camp put in order, while water and firewood were fetched. The tents were pitched in long lines, in the first 86 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS of which stood my tent, flanked by those of the other white men and by the dining tent. In the next line were the cook tent, the provision tent, the store tent, the skinning tent, and the like; and then came the lines of small white tents for the porters. Between each row of tents was a broad street. In front of our own tents in the first line an askari was always pacing to and fro; and when night fell we would kindle a camp-fire and sit around it under the stars. Before each of the porters’ tents was a little fire, and be- side it stood the pots and pans in which the porters did their cooking. Here and there were larger fires, around which the gun-bearers or a group of askaris or of saises might gather. After nightfall the multitude of fires lit up the darkness and showed the tents in shadowy outline; and around them squatted the porters, their faces flickering from dusk to ruddy light, as they chatted together or sud- denly started some snatch of wild African melody in which all their neighbors might join. After a while the talk and laughter and singing would gradually die away, and as we white men sat around our fire, the silence would be un- broken except by the queer cry of a hyena, or much more rarely by a sound that always demanded attention—the yawning grunt of a questing lion. If we wished to make an early start we would breakfast by dawn and then we often returned to camp for lunch. Otherwise we would usually be absent all day, carrying our lunch with us. We might get in before sunset or we might be out till long after nightfall; and then the gleam of the lit fires was a welcome sight as we stumbled toward them through the darkness. Once in, each went to his tent to take a hot bath; and then, clean and refreshed, we ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE 87 sat down to a comfortable dinner, with game of some sort as the principal dish. On the first march after leaving our lion camp at Potha I shot a wart-hog. It was a good-sized sow, which, in com- pany with several of her half-grown offspring, was grazing near our line of march; there were some thorn-trees which gave a little cover, and I killed her at a hundred and eighty yards, using the Springfield, the lightest and handiest of all my rifles. Her flesh was good to eat, and the skin, as with all our specimens, was saved for the National Museum. I did not again have to shoot a sow, although I killed half- grown pigs for the table, and boars for specimens. ‘This sow and her porkers were not rooting, but were grazing as if they had been antelope; her stomach contained noth- ing but chopped green grass. Wart-hogs are common throughout the country over which we hunted. They are hideous beasts, with strange protuberances on their cheeks; and when alarmed they trot or gallop away, holding the tail perfectly erect with the tassel bent forward. Usually they are seen in family parties, but a big boar will often be alone. They often root up the ground, but the stomachs of those we shot were commonly filled with nothing but grass. If the weather is cloudy or wet they may be out all day long, but in hot, dry weather we generally found them abroad only in the morning and evening. A pig is always a comical animal; even more so than is the case with a bear, which also impresses one with a sense of grotesque humor—and this notwithstanding the fact that both boar and bear may be very formidable creatures. A wart-hog standing alertly at gaze, head and tail up, legs straddled out, and ears cocked forward, is rather a figure of fun; 88 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS and not the less so when with characteristic suddenness he bounces round with a grunt and scuttles madly off to safety. Wart-hogs are beasts of the bare plain or open forest, and though they will often lie up in patches of brush they do not care for thick timber. After shooting the wart-hog we marched on to our camp at Bondoni. The gun-bearers were Mohammedans, and the dead pig was of no service to them; and at their request I walked out while camp was being pitched and shot them a buck; this I had to do now and then, but | always shot males, so as not to damage the species. Next day we marched to the foot of Kilimakiu Moun- tain, near Captain Slatter’s ostrich-farm. Our route lay across bare plains thickly covered with withered short grass. All around us as we marched were the game herds, zebras and hartebeests, gazelles of the two kinds, and now and then wildebeests. Hither and thither over the plain, cross- ing and recrossing, ran the dusty game trails, each with its myriad hoof-marks; the round hoof-prints of the zebra, the heart-shaped marks that showed where the hartebeest herd had trod, and the delicate etching that betrayed where the smaller antelope had passed. Occasionally we crossed the trails of the natives, worn deep in the hard soil by the countless thousands of bare or sandalled feet that had trodden them. Africa is a country of trails. Across the high veldt, in every direction, run the tangled trails of the multitudes of game that have lived thereon from time im- memorial. The great beasts of the marsh and the forest made therein broad and muddy trails which often offer the only pathway by which a man can enter the sombre depths. In wet ground and dry alike are also found the ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE 89 trails of savage man. They lead from village to village, and in places they stretch for hundreds of miles, where trading parties have worn them in the search for ivory, or in the old days when raiding or purchasing slaves. The trails made by the men are made much as the beasts make theirs. They are generally longer and better defined, al- though I have seen hippo tracks more deeply marked than any made by savage man. But they are made simply by men following in one another’s footsteps, and they are never quite straight. They bend now a little to one side, now a little to the other, and sudden loops mark the spot where some vanished obstacle once stood; around it the first trail makers went, and their successors have ever trodden in their footsteps, even though the need for so doing has long passed away. Our camp at Kilimakiu was by a grove of shady trees, and from it at sunset we looked across the vast plain and saw the far-off mountains grow umber and purple as the light waned. Back of the camp, and of the farm-house near which we were, rose Kilimakiu Mountain, beautifully studded with groves of trees of many kinds. On its farther side lived a tribe of the Wakamba. Their chief with all the leading men of his village came in state to call upon me, and presented me with a fat hairy sheep, of the ordinary kind found in this part of Africa, where the sheep very wisely do not grow wool. The headman was dressed in khaki, and showed me with pride an official document which confirmed him in his position by direction of the government, and required him to perform various acts, chiefly in the way of preventing his tribes-people from committing robbery or murder, and of helping to stamp 90 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS out cattle disease. Like all the Wakamba they had flocks of goats and sheep, and herds of humped cattle; but they were much in need of meat and hailed my advent. They were wild savages with filed teeth, many of them stark naked, though some of them carried a blanket. Their heads were curiously shaved so that the hair tufts stood out in odd patterns, and they carried small bows, and arrows with poisoned heads. The following morning I rode out with Captain Slatter. We kept among the hills. The long drought was still un- broken. The little pools were dry and their bottoms baked like iron, and there was not a drop in the watercourses. Part of the land was open and part covered with a thin forest or bush of scattered mimosa trees. In the open country were many zebras and hartebeests, and the latter were found even in the thin bush. In the morning we found a small herd of eland at which, after some stalking, I got a long shot and missed. The eland is the largest of all the horned creatures that are called antelope, being quite as heavy as a fattened ox. The herd I approached consisted of a dozen individuals, two of them huge bulls, their coats having turned a slaty blue, their great dewlaps hanging down, and the legs looking almost too small for the massive bodies. The reddish-colored cows were of far lighter build. Eland are beautiful creatures and ought to be domesticated. As I crept toward them I was struck by their likeness to great, clean, handsome cattle. They were grazing or rest- ing, switching their long tails at the flies that hung in attendance upon them and lit on their flanks, just as if they were Jerseys in a field at home. My bullet fell short, their size Causing me to underestimate the distance, and away ON SAFARI. RHINO AND GIRAFFE 91 they went at a run, one or two of the cows in the first hurry and confusion skipping clean over the backs of others that got in their way—a most unexpected example of agility in such large and ponderous animals. After a few hundred yards they settled down to the slashing trot which is their natural gait, and disappeared over the brow of a hill. The morning was a blank, but early in the afternoon we saw the eland herd again. They were around a tree in an open space, and we could not get near them. But in- stead of going straight away they struck off to the right and described almost a semicircle, and though they were over four hundred yards distant, they were such big creatures and their gait was so steady that I felt warranted in shoot- ing. On the dry plain I could mark where my bullets fell, and though I could not get a good chance at the bull I finally downed a fine cow; and by pacing I found it to be a little over a quarter of a mile from where I stood when shooting. It was about nine miles from camp, and I dared not leave the eland alone, so I stationed one of the gun-bearers by the great carcass and sent a messenger in to Heller, on whom we depended for preserving the skins of the big game. Hardly had this been done when a Wakamba man came running up to tell us that there was a rhinoceros on the hillside three-quarters of a mile away, and that he had left a companion to watch it while he carried us the news. Slatter and I immediately rode in the direction given, fol- lowing our wild-looking guide; the other gun-bearer trotting after us. In five minutes we had reached the opposite hill- crest, where the watcher stood, and he at once pointed out the rhino. The huge beast was standing in entirely open 92 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS country, although there were a few scattered trees of no great size at some little distance from him. We left our horses in a dip of the ground and began the approach; I cannot say that we stalked him, for the approach was too easy. The wind blew from him to us, and a rhino’s eyesight is dull. Thirty yards from where he stood was a bush four or five feet high, and though it was so thin that we could distinctly see him through the leaves, it shielded us from the vision of his small, piglike eyes as we advanced toward it, stooping and in single file, I leading. The big beast stood like an uncouth statue, his hide black in the sun- light; he seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world’s past, from the days when the beasts of the prime ran riot in their strength, before man grew so cunning of brain and hand as to master them. So little did he dream of our presence that when we were a hundred yards off he actually lay down. Walking lightly, and with every sense keyed up, we at last reached the bush, and I pushed forward the safety of the double-barrelled Holland rifle which I was now to use for the first time on big game. As I stepped to one side of the bush so as to get a clear aim, with Slatter following, the rhino saw me and jumped to his feet with the agility of a polo pony. As he rose | put in the right barrel, the bullet going through both lungs. At the same moment he wheeled, the blood spouting from his nostrils, and galloped full on us. Before he could get quite all the way round in his head- long rush to reach us, I struck him with my left-hand barrel, the bullet entering between the neck and shoulder and piercing his heart. At the same instant Captain Slatter fired, his bullet entering the neck vertebre. Ploughing up eee eee Mrcasooy “apy KQ paystusn| suorigrsosap wmos{ pun sydps8ojoyd woal usmpoon “y éymg