TO LAKE NAIVASHA 217 



a second or two by a succession of similar sounds, uttered 

 more quickly and in a lower tone. These big owls fre- 

 quently came round camp after dark, and at first their 

 notes completely puzzled me, as I thought they must be 

 made by some beast. The bulbuls sang well. Most of 

 the birds were in no way like our home birds. 



Loring trapped quantities of mice and rats, and it was 

 curious to see how many of them had acquired characters 

 which caused them superficially to resemble American 

 animals with which they had no real kinship. The sand 

 rats that burrowed in the dry plains were in shape, in color, 

 eyes, tail, and paws strikingly like our pocket gophers, 

 which have similar habits. So the long-tailed gerbilles, 

 or gerbille-like rats, resembled our kangaroo rats; and 

 there was a blunt-nosed, stubby-tailed little rat superficially 

 hardly to be told from our rice rat. But the most charac- 

 teristic rodent, the big long-tailed, jumping springhaas, re- 

 sembled nothing of ours; and there were tree rats and 

 spiny mice. There were gray monkeys in the trees around 

 camp, which the naturalists shot. 



Heller trapped various beasts; beautifully marked 

 genets, and a big white-tailed mongoose which was very 

 savage. But his most remarkable catch was a leopard. He 

 had set a steel trap, fastened to a loose thorn-branch, for 

 mongoose, civets, or jackals; it was a number two Blake, 

 such as in America we use for coons, skunks, foxes, and 

 perhaps bobcats and coyotes. In the morning he found 

 it gone, and followed the trail of the thorn-branch until 

 it led into a dense thicket, from which issued an ominous 

 growl. His native boy shouted "simba"; but it was a 

 leopard, not a lion. He could not see into the thicket; so 



