680 AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 



motionless, especially if he is under or beside even the small- 

 est and most scantily leaved bush. Their sense of smell is 

 keen, as with all game. 



They are grass-eaters, and are emphatically animals of 

 the open plains, seeming to be indifferent as to whether 

 these are entirely bare of trees or are thinly dotted with 

 occasional thorny acacias. We never saw them in anything 

 resembling thick cover, not even in such cover as that to 

 which their companions, the hartebeests, sometimes pene- 

 trated; but in places they seemed to like the plains over 

 which acacias were scattered, and would stand or rest at mid- 

 day in their shade. As with other game, it was astonish- 

 ing to see how they abounded, and how fat they became, in 

 dry, open country, where water was scarce and the pastur- 

 age brown and withered. As long as they could reach water 

 once in twenty-four hours, and find abundant pasturage of 

 the kind they liked — no matter how dry — within eight or 

 ten miles of the water, they throve. In such a district they 

 lived throughout the year, seeming to migrate much less 

 freely than the wildebeest and some other game — in fact, 

 the only migrations we heard of were those occurring when 

 they had to leave a given district because the water and 

 herbage failed outright. On the Athi and Kapiti Plains we 

 were informed by the settlers that the zebras stayed all 

 the time, with very slight shifts of a few miles one way or the 

 other, as the different scries of pools dried or filled. In the 

 Sotik we were informed that in times of drought the zebra 

 and almost all the other game were obliged to abandon 

 extensive regions in which they swarmed after the rains. 

 Like so many big animals, zebras are not favored by a 

 rank and luxurious plant growth. We never saw them in 



