648 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



Stewart Edward White states that on one occasion, near 

 the Tana River, he struck a locahty where rhinoceros after 

 rhinoceros charged quite unprovoked, and he had to shoot 

 half a dozen. We have known a rhino charge through a 

 camp at night and cause wild panic; they not infrequently 

 charge hunters or travellers after dark. 



Personally, we consider the rhinoceros the least danger- 

 ous of all really dangerous game, although many good hunt- 

 ers hold the contrary view. The first one any of us saw, a 

 bull, charged savagely when mortally wounded at a distance 

 of a little over thirty yards, and was killed just thirteen 

 yards from the hunter. But we were never really charged 

 again. Colonel Roosevelt hit and knocked over one animal 

 which we had stalked, as it was galloping toward us at a 

 distance of seventy or eighty yards, but we think that this 

 rhino was curious rather than enraged, and would not have 

 charged home. Kermit was charged by one which he had 

 mortally wounded, but it turned upon receiving another 

 and much slighter wound. Two or three of our American 

 friends who have hunted in East Africa have had narrow 

 escapes from rhinos which charged after being wounded, or 

 when the effort was made to photograph them. 



Unquestionably, compared to his mild and placid 

 square-mouthed kinsman, the hook-lipped rhino is a 

 fidgety, restless, irritable, and at times dangerous, crea- 

 ture. Yet his occasional truculence is more than offset 

 by his stupidity and dull eyesight, so far as the actual con- 

 test with the hunter is concerned. As far as we know but 

 one white man has ever been killed while hunting rhinos in 

 East Africa (the English official already mentioned was not 

 hunting the beast which killed him). This was a German, 



