THE LARGER EAST AFRICAN ANTELOPES 



gallop off in another second, with their strange, heavy- 

 leaps, and then sometimes go a long distance before set- 

 tling down to feed again. On the Sotik plains I once put 

 up a couple of fine eland bulls, which I succeeded in sep- 

 arating from a small herd and then stalked for hours, with 

 a view of getting a good snap shot of them, but all in vain. 

 The animals had evidently not been much hunted, for 

 they would let me come up to within some two hundred 

 yards of them each time. Then they galloped off for an- 

 other few hundred yards, when they would stop again, 

 until I had managed to steal up to about the same dis- 

 tance as before. 



My experience this time proved the great vitality of 

 the eland. At about four o'clock in the afternoon I had 

 come up again within some two hundred yards of the 

 animals, and determined that if I could not get a snap shot 

 of them, I should shoot the largest of the two, both because 

 we needed the meat and because some of my Kikuju men 

 had begged me to let them have the tough skin to cut into 

 straps, with which to carry their loads. This tribe gener- 

 ally does this in such a way that they let the load rest on 

 the back, with the sling supporting it from the forehead, 

 just as the hunting guides in northeastern United States 

 and Canada. It was impossible to photograph the bulls, 

 and so I fired with the .405 Winchester with a steel-capped 

 bullet, aiming for the heart of the largest eland. At the 

 crack of the gun both bounded off in big leaps, and my 

 gun bearer expressed his disappointment again in the 

 words : " Hapana piga, bwana," or " You did not hit, sir." 

 I felt quite surprised myself, as I thought I had taken a 

 very careful aim, but being sure that I must have hit the 

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