THE BIG GAME OF AFRICA 



people or cattle, confining its meals, as a rule, to putre- 

 fied meat. 



The more common, and much larger spotted hyena is, 

 indeed, a very uncanny-looking kind of creature. Al- 

 though not quite as long, it stands somewhat higher than 

 the lion, on account of its extremely long fore legs, which 

 make the back of the animal slope down even more than 

 that of the kongoni. The color of the spotted hyena is of 

 a grayish brown, with irregular and very dark brown 

 spots, which sometimes appear to be almost black. The 

 head of this hyena is not very unlike that of a large dog; 

 its upper part is very round and thick, and the ears are 

 comparatively small and rounded; the tail is rather short 

 and bushy. The jaw muscles and teeth of this beast are 

 of the most extraordinary strength. I have heard from 

 reliable sources that bones, which would defy even leopards 

 and lions, were with ease crushed by the hyena. On visit- 

 ing one of the places where I had the day before shot a 

 giraffe, the leg bones of which had been left on the ground, 

 we found to our amazement that these heavy bones had 

 been crushed by the hyenas, and the greater part of them 

 devoured for the sake of the marrow. From the disagree- 

 able howls in the night, and from the tracks that we saw 

 around the carcass of this giraffe, we had evidence enough 

 that its bones had been devoured, not by lions, but by these 

 scavengers, which would instantly have fled if the " King 

 of Beasts " had appeared. 



It has often been said that this spotted hyena feeds only 

 upon animals that it finds already dead, and that it prefers 

 putrefied meat to that which has been freshly killed. It 

 is true that it does not abhor the most putrefied carcasses, 



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