196 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



teeth. Death to the head of a family in en- 

 counter with an elephant or rhino might mean 

 literal starvation to the weaker members. They 

 were able to exist at all only because they had 

 developed their senses and powers to a degree 

 that placed them level with the creatures they 

 dreaded or preyed upon. They climbed the 

 huge trees almost as well as the big black-and- 

 white monkey. I had with me gun-bearers 

 from the hunting tribes of the plains, men ac- 

 customed to the chase, but brought up in vil- 

 lages where there was tillage and where goats 

 and cattle were raised. These gun-bearers of 

 mine were good trackers and at home in the 

 ordinary wilderness. But compared to these 

 true wild men of the forest they might almost 

 as well have been town-bred. The 'Ndorobo 

 trackers would take me straight to some partic- 

 ular tree or spot of ground, through miles of 

 dense, steaming woodland every rood of which 

 looked like every other, returning with unerring 

 precision to a goal which my gun-bearers would 

 have been as helpless to find again as I was 

 myself; and they interpreted trails and signs 

 and footprint-scrapes which we either hardly 

 saw or else misread. 



Doubtless the ancestors, or some of the 

 ancestors, of these men had lived in the land. 



