446 THE GIANT ELAND [ch. xv 



and women stark naked, and their bodies daubed with 

 mud, grease, and ashes to keep off the mosquitoes. 



On March 4 we were steaming slowly along the 

 reedy, water-soaked shores of Lake No, keeping a sharp 

 lookout for the white-eared kob, and especially for the 

 handsome saddle-marked lechwe kob, which has been 

 cursed with the foolishly inappropriate name of '* INIrs. 

 Gray's waterbuck." 



Early in the morning we saw a herd of these saddle- 

 marked lechwe in tlie long marsh grass, and pushed the 

 steamer's nose as near to the shore as possible. Then 

 Cuninghame, keen-eyed Kongoni, and I started for what 

 prov^ed to be a five hours' tramp. The walking was 

 hard ; sometimes we were on dry land, but more often 

 in water up to oiu* ankles or knees, and occasionally 

 floundering and wallowing up to our hips through 

 stretches of reeds, water-lilies, green water, and foul 

 black slime. Yet there were ant-hills in the marsh. 

 Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the game in small 

 patches of open ground covered with short grass, but 

 almost always they kept to the high grass and reeds. 

 There were with the herd two very old bucks, with a 

 white saddle-shaped patch on the withers, the white 

 extending up the back of the neck to the head — a mark 

 of their being in full maturity, or past it, for on some of 

 the males at least this coloration only begins to appear 

 M'^hen they seem already to have attained their growth 

 of horn and body, their teeth showing them to be five 

 or six years old, while they are obviously in the prime 

 of vigour and breeding capacity. Unfortunately, in the 

 long grass it was impossible to single out these old 

 bucks. Marking as well as we could the general direc- 

 tion of the herd, we would steal toward it until we 

 thought we were in the neighbourhood, and then 



