448 THE GIANT ELAND [ch. xv 



glimpse of two more of the herd rushing off to our right, 

 and we heard another grunting and sneaking away, 

 invisible, thirty yards or so to our left. 



Half an hour afterward I shot another buck, at over 

 a hundred and fifty yards, after much the same kind of 

 experience. At this one I fired four times, hitting him 

 with three bullets ; three of the shots were taken when I 

 could only see his horns and had to guess at the position 

 of the body. This was a very big buck, with horns over 

 twenty-nine inches long, but the saddle-mark was yellow, 

 with many whitish hairs, showing that he was about to 

 assume the white saddle of advanced maturity. His 

 stomach was full of the fine swamp grass. 



These handsome antelopes come next to the situtunga 

 as lovers of water and dwellers in the marshes. They 

 are far more properly to be called " waterbuck " than 

 are the present proprietors of that name, which, like the 

 ordinary kob, though liking to be near streams, spend 

 most of their time on dry plains and hill-sides. This 

 saddle- marked antelope of the swamps has the hoofs 

 very long and the whole foot flexible and spreading, so 

 as to help it in passing over wet ground and soft mud ; 

 the pasterns behind are largely bare of hair. It seems to 

 be much like the lechwe, a less handsome, but equally 

 water-loving, antelope of Southern Africa, which is put 

 in the same genus with the waterbuck and kob. 



That afternoon Dr. Mearns killed with his X'N^inchester 

 •30 to '40, on the wing, one of the most interesting birds 

 we obtained on our whole trip, the whale-billed stork. It 

 was an old male, and its gizzard was full of the remains 

 of small fish. The whalebill is a large wader, blackish- 

 grey in colour, slightly crested, with big feet and a huge 

 swollen bill — a queer-looking bird, with no near kinsfolk, 

 and so interesting that nothing would have persuaded 



