892 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiv 



very abundant, hanging in the thinly-leaved acacias 

 around the tents, and, as everywhere else, were crepus- 

 cular — indeed, to a large extent actually diurnal — in habit. 

 They saw w^ell and flew well by daylight, passing the 

 time hanging from twigs. They became active before 

 sunset. In catching insects they behaved not like swal- 

 lows, but like flycatchers. Except that they perched 

 upside down, so to speak — that is, that they hung from 

 the twigs instead of sitting on them— their conduct was 

 precisely that of a phoebe-bird or a wood peewee. Each 

 bat hung from its twig until it espied a passing insect, 

 when it swooped down upon it, and after a short flight 

 returned with its booty to the same perch or went on 

 to a new one close by ; and it kept twitching its long 

 ears as it hung head downward devouring its prey. 



There were no native villages in our immediate neigh- 

 bourhood, and the game was not shy. There were 

 many buck : waterbuck, kob, hartebeest, bushbuck, 

 reedbuck, oribi, and duiker. Every day or two Kermit 

 or I would shoot a buck for the camp. We generally 

 went out together with our gun-bearers, Kermit striding 

 along in front, with short trousers and leggings, his 

 knees bare. Sometimes only one of us would go out. 

 The kob and waterbuck were usually found in bands, 

 and were perhaps the commonest of all. The buck 

 seemed to have no settled time for feeding. Two oribi 

 which I shot were feeding right in the open, just at 

 noon, utterly indifferent to the heat. There were hippo 

 both in the bay and in the river. All night long we 

 could hear them splashing, snorting, and grunting ; they 

 were very noisy, sometimes uttering a strange, long- 

 drawn bellow, a little like the exhaust of a giant steam- 

 pipe, once or twice whinnying or neighing; but usually 

 making a succession of grunts or bubbling squeals 



