THE HIPPOPOTAMUS, OR RIVER HORSE 



three inches long, but not very deep, just above the knee. 

 I then reaHzed that I must have knocked my leg against 

 some pole or other sharp object, which had stuck in the 

 bottom of the river. 



Having cut two holes in the skin of the hippo's neck, 

 I tied the end of the rope through the loop, and called to 

 the men to pull us ashore. Just as the line began to 

 straighten I lost my balance for a moment, and rolled com- 

 pletely over with the hippo, a rather unpleasant experi- 

 ence that I repeated twice before we were landed on the 

 opposite shore. But my trophy was saved, and no one 

 in the world could have been more delighted than I when 

 we began to cut up the big monster. 



Another hippo shot in the same river a few days later 

 floated up in exactly thirty-two minutes, taking five minutes 

 longer than the one just referred to. The second one was 

 a very much larger bull hippo, and was shot in a smaller 

 pool, above which was a rather deep ford, and below which 

 there was another succession of foaming rapids. As soon 

 as the body floated up, it was unfortunately carried by the 

 current in among the bushes on the opposite shore, where 

 it began to go slowly downstream. As the rapids were 

 only about one hundred yards farther down, and as the 

 swiftness of the current increased with every yard, I 

 rushed some men across the stream to fasten a rope to the 

 hippo, while we held on to the other end. They succeeded 

 in reaching the carcass only after it had moved along an- 

 other fifty yards and had come into rather swift-flowing 

 water, but close to the opposite shore. As the two men had 

 finished tying the rope to the big body, they swam ashore 

 — a distance of only some four or five yards — and at the 



99 



