42 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH [ch. ii 



from their house on the Mua Hills, with their guest, 

 Selous, to take lunch. This, by the way, was after I 

 had shot my first lions, and I was much pleased to be 

 able to show Selous the trophies. 



My gentle-voiced hostess and her daughter had seen 

 many strange lands and strange happenings, as was 

 natural with a husband and father of such adventure- 

 loving nature. They took a keen interest, untinged by 

 the slightest nervousness, in every kind of wild creature, 

 from lions and leopards down. The game was in sight 

 from the veranda of the house almost every hour of the 

 day. Early one morning, in the mist, three hartebeests 

 came right up to the wire fence, two score yards from 

 the house itself; and the black and white striped 

 zebra and ruddy hartebeest grazed or rested through 

 the long afternoons in plain view on the hillsides 

 opposite. 



It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to 

 realize the immense quantities of game to be found on 

 the Kapiti Plains and Athi Plains and the hills that 

 bound them. The common game of tlie plains, the 

 animals of which I saw most while at Kitanga and in 

 the neighbourhood, were the zebi-a, wildebeest, harte- 

 beest. Grant's gazelle, and "tommies," or Thomson's 

 gazelle ; the zebra and the hartebeest, usually known 

 by the Swahili name of kongoni, being by far the most 

 plentiful. Then there w^ere impalla, mountain reed- 

 buck, duyker, steinbuck, and diminutive dikdik. As 

 we travelled and liunted, we were hardly ever out of 

 sight of game ; and on Pease's farm itself there were 

 many thousand head, and so there were on Slatter's. 

 If wealthy men, who desire sport of the most varied 

 and interesting kind, would purchase farms like these, 

 they could get, for much less money, many times the 



