THE HIPPOPOTAMUS, OR RIVER HORSE 



up against the stream to the shore ; I shouted to MwaHmu 

 to cut off the head, which he did with a couple of mighty 

 strokes, and the men began to pull in the magnificent head. 

 The reader cannot imagine how badly I felt, when, by the 

 increased force of the water, the new, more than half-inch- 

 thick line again parted, and the big head was swept down 

 the rapids, never again to be seen by us: and thus ended 

 my hippo hunting in East Africa. 



The hippo is a very destructive animal. On his long 

 nightly wanderings, when he sometimes goes as far as one 

 to two miles from the water, he seems to develop an enor- 

 mous appetite. Very often he goes right into the gar- 

 dens of the white settlers or natives, where in one night 

 a single hippo is able to devour more vegetables than a 

 settler and his whole family could eat in a month! This 

 is nothing to wonder at, when the fact is known that the 

 mighty pachyderm carries a monstrous stomach, unpro- 

 portionately large, which by actual measurement has been 

 found to exceed even eleven feet in length, and capable of 

 containing four to five bushels of food ! 



The hippos vary in size quite a little, those of the 

 streams being considerably smaller, as a general rule, than 

 the ones found in larger lakes. From three to four thou- 

 sand pounds is a heavy weight for a river hippo, whereas 

 animals have been shot in the lakes both of Uganda and 

 German East Africa weighing more than twice as much. 

 In the same proportion do their tusks vary from twelve 

 to eighteen inches in length on the outside curve of a good- 

 sized river hippo, while I recently saw a pair of tusks from 

 a monstrous old bull, killed in a Nyassa Land lake, whose 

 tusks measured twenty-eight and a half inches. The 



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