THE EAST AFRICAN RAILROAD 95 



tropic town if he can in any way avoid doing so. Each official keeps 

 his private car, not moved by electricity, but pushed by coolies, and 

 bearing him from office to house and back again. 



It is such a conveyance of which the hunter avails himself. Leav- 

 ing the train, he has only to get a trolley car and have himself pushed 

 up and down the line. The animals pay no more attention to this than 

 to the trains, becoming suspicious only when train or trolley stops. 

 The shrewd hunter, therefore, slips off the car while it is in motion, 

 and thus may find himself within a few hundred yards of his quarry, 

 while the car goes on. His fortune then will depend upon his degree 

 of skill with the rifle. 



This is one way of obtaining game. It is not the way in which 

 a trained hunter like Colonel Roosevelt would be inclined to indulge 

 largely. It looks too much like taking an unfair advantage of the 

 animals. There is a second method which proved more to his taste. 

 This is to leave the railway and prowl about among the trees and un- 

 dergrowth of a neighboring river bed. Here in a few minutes one 

 may bury oneself in the wildest and savagest kind of forest. The air 

 becomes still and hot over the open spaces of dry sand and the pools 

 of water. High grass, huge boulders, tangled vegetation, multitudes 

 of thorn-bushes obstruct the march, and the ground itself is scarped 

 and guttered by the rains into the strangest formations. Around the 

 hunter, breast-high, shoulder-high, overhead, rises the African jungle. 

 There is a brooding silence, broken now by the voice of a bird, now 

 by the scolding bark of a baboon, or by the crunching of one's own 

 feet on the crumbling soil. We enter the haunt of the wild beasts; 

 their tracks, the remnants of their repasts, are easily and frequently 

 discovered. Here a lion has passed since the morning. There a 

 rhinoceros has certainly been within the hour — perhaps within ten 

 minutes. We creep and scramble through the game paths, anxiously, 

 rifles at full cock, not knowing what each turn or step may reveal. 

 The wind, when it blows at all, blows fitfully, now from this quarter, 

 now from that ; so that one can never be certain that it will not betray 

 the intruder in these grim domains to the beast he seeks, or to some 

 other, less welcome, before he sees him. At length, after two hours' 

 scramble and scrape, probably without seeing a beast — lion or rhinoc- 



