ii6 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES chap. 



feasting on it undisturbed, the noises they make are 

 most interesting to listen to. They laugh, they 

 shriek, they howl, and in addition they make all 

 kinds of gurgling, grunting, cackling noises, im- 

 possible to describe accurately. Once, late one 

 evening in 1873, I shot a white rhinoceros cow that 

 had a smallish calf, which, however, I thought was 

 laro-e enough to fend for itself and get its own 

 living. That night, after having cut off all the 

 best and fattest meat of the rhinoceros, we camped 

 some two hundred yards from the carcase, which 

 lay in an open valley close to a pool of water. 

 Soon after dark the hyaenas began to collect for 

 the feast, and whether the calf returned to its 

 mother's remains and the hyaenas forthwith attacked 

 it, or whether it resented their presence and first 

 attacked them, I do not know ;,but we first heard it 

 snorting and then squealing like a pig, and for half 

 the night it was rushing about, closely pursued by 

 some of the hyaenas, which, I fancy, must have 

 been hanging on to its ears and any other part they 

 could get hold of. Twice the young rhinoceros 

 charged almost into our camp, squealing lustily. 

 Finally, the hyaenas killed it, and had left hardly 

 anything of it the next morning. I shall never 

 forget the extraordinary noises these animals made 

 that night. 



Contrary to generally accepted ideas, I have not 

 found hyaenas when killed to be more stinking 

 animals than other carnivorous beasts. The carcase 

 of a freshly killed hyaena certainly does not smell as 

 strongly as that of a lion. I have often had the 

 raw hide neck straps attached to the ox yokes of 

 my South African waggon eaten by hyaenas at 

 night in Matabeleland, and to do this, these animals 

 must have been right amongst the oxen, gnawing 

 the raw hide thongs within a few feet of them, yet 

 I never remember such a proceeding to have caused 



