328 
appointed place in the forest. Having 
exhausted my sportsman privileges so far 
as bulls were concerned, the only chance 
of adding a needed fine male elephant 
to the collection was through Bibi. 
A bad start was made on this occasion: 
the two highly perfumed Kikuyu guides 
ran us around in circles, while the ten 
porters carrying camp equipment and 
rations for four days, contributed to the 
annoyance and delay by continually 
falling behind and losing themselves in 
the jungle. About noon we came to a 
fresh trail, not of elephant, but of our 
own making where we had passed three 
hours before. Considerable valuable 
time was then devoted to sitting on a log 
while the Swahili interpreter cursed the 
guides in Swahili, Kikuyu, and several 
other dialects, and the gun-bearers 
rounded up the porters, after which we 
administered a fine of a week’s wages 
all around, put the guides in the rear and 
struck a course due northwest, by com- 
pass. 
The guides came up at regular inter- 
vals with the protest that if we continued 
in that direction, we would come to a 
stream, crossing which would land us 
in the country of a hostile tribe and we 
would be promptly annihilated. We 
continued on however until dark with- 
out reaching the dead-line or finding 
spoor fresh enough to tempt us away 
from our course. This course had led us 
through the more open ground of the 
timber belt which les between the 
shambas (cultivated fields) and the 
bamboo forests. It was here that we 
hoped to cross the spoor of elephants 
where they had passed from one to the 
other of these, their two favorite feeding 
grounds. 
We made our camp beside a great 
fallen tree whose dry top afforded a good 
supply of firewood; water was brought 
from a hundred yards down the slope 
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
where an ice-cold rivulet had found a 
bed in the sombre shade of great ebony- 
stalked tree-ferns. Amidst such scenes 
as these the weariness and disappoint- 
ments of a hard day of fruitless hunting 
become as but the memory of an un- 
pleasant dream, and by the time camp is 
made and tired limbs are stretched 
before the fire, we are longing for the 
morning, that we may be off again, 
away through the great, mysterious 
forest, forgetting at times, as we go, 
the main object of our search, lost in 
admiration of the weird and sombre 
vistas, brightened here and there by 
festoons of flowering vines or the crim- 
son flash of a plantain-eater’s wings. 
As we travel along through the forest 
gloom, silently, in harmony with our 
surroundings, we may be startled from 
our reveries by the hoarse leopard-like 
bark of an old Colobus monkey, followed 
by the wild reckless rush of the whole 
troop as they make for the topmost 
branches of some great forest tree. There 
they sit motionless, invisible, although 
in plain view, their white plumed tails 
waving gently in the breeze, midst wav- 
ing streamers of moss. 
Guided by the compass, we had trav- 
eled less than an hour next morning when 
we came to the spoor of an old bull, 
where he had been mooning about, 
feeding, during the night. Following it, 
we soon became lo t in a maze of tracks 
which seemed to indicate that not only 
one but three or four old fellows had 
spent the night in and about the some- 
what open forest in which we now found 
ourselves. 
For a long time we puzzled about on 
these tracks trying to strike a lead, 
but more often than not coming back 
to a familiar spot. Then we would 
strike off and pick up the spoor in a new 
place only to be led back to the unsolv- 
able network of tracks again. At one 
