ALONG THE TRAIL 123 
I went over to the bush where the wounded animal 
had gone down near me, and stood for a moment 
looking at him open-mouthed and wondering what he 
was. Never had I heard of such an antelope. He 
had sharp straight horns four inches long and was a 
beautiful French gray in colour. Before I could 
observe anything else, he sprang to his feet and 
darted away on three legs faster, it seemed to me, than 
anything I had ever seen travel. I shot several times 
but never touched him. I followed for hours but did 
not overtake him. Later I learned that he was one of 
the little beira antelope. The species had been 
described some time before from fragments of skin 
obtained from natives. As far as records show, 
these specimens, an adult female and a half-grown 
one, were the first specimens taken by a white man. 
This is a good example of a mistake that a hunter 
may easily make where there is nothing about of 
known size to give scale. The outline of the beira, 
characterized by the large ears, is almost a miniature 
of that of the koodoo. These tiny antelope had stood 
against a background of acacias on a pebbly slope. 
Acacias grow both large and small and a pebble 
among pebbles on a distant hillside may appear as 
a large boulder. 
I continued hunting the little devils in a desperate 
effort to get amaleatleast. Several times I spent the 
day working about the two cone-shaped hills, now 
and then catching glimpses of the beira, only to have 
them disappear before I could shoot or get near 
enough to shoot. Several times when leaving the 
