AFRICAN WILD BOAR. 193 
ill through fear, so I concluded I had better move, for 
the people would lay the blame upon me. People have 
to be very prudent in such a wild country. 
So we moved our traps a few miles off and built 
our camp; this was hardly done when a storm burst 
upon us, and the rain poured down by bucketsful, and 
the thunder and the lightning was something terrific. 
It was a good thing that our shades were right, for we 
should have been wet to the skin. 
Karly the next morning I shouldered my rifle and set 
off for the wildest part of the wood with friends Malaouen 
and Querlaouen, who now felt quite happy since we had 
left the abandoned village. The woods were pretty hard 
to go through, for the hunting-paths had not beer used 
often, for fear of the Bakalai living in the Ashankolo. 
In this gigantic forest there is a most extraordinary 
kind of wild boar, its body being of a bright red-yellow 
color, somewhat like that of an orange. How strange 
they look as they wander through the forest, sometimes 
a few together, at other times twenty or thirty, or even 
larger numbers! 
That morning we got into new and fresh tracks of 
the wild boars; the earth was all uprooted by their snouts. 
IT am sure they had not come to the place a half-hour be- 
fore we did, and what a havoc they had made! We fol- 
lowed the tracks in hot haste; soon we could hear their 
erunts, and we thought they enuat be numerous by the 
noise they made. 
How to approach them was die difficult question ; for 
if there is any wild game, this is certainly one of the 
wildest sort I know. If there had been two or three of 
them together we might not have had so much difficulty 
I 
