220 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



it is exceedingly difficult to say whether the animal seen 

 is a bull or a cow. As the time allowed for a shot is very 

 short, and any hesitation probably insures the animal's 

 escape, this means that two or three hippo may be killed, 

 quite unavoidably, before the right specimen is secured. 

 Still there may be interesting and exciting incidents in a 

 hippo hunt. Cuninghame, the two Attenboroughs, and I 

 started early in the launch, towing the big, clumsy row-boat, 

 with as crew three of our porters who could row. We 

 steamed down the lake some fifteen miles to a wide bay, 

 indented by smaller bays, lagoons, and inlets, all fringed 

 by a broad belt of impenetrable papyrus, while the beauti- 

 ful purple lilies, with their leathery-tough stems and broad 

 surface-floating leaves, filled the shallows. At the mouth 

 of the main bay we passed a floating island, a mass of papy- 

 rus perhaps a hundred and fifty acres in extent, which had 

 been broken off from the shore somewhere, and was float- 

 ing over the lake as the winds happened to drive it. 



In an opening in the dense papyrus masses we left the 

 launch moored, and Cuninghame and I started in the row- 

 boat to coast the green wall of tall, thick-growing, feather- 

 topped reeds. Under the bright sunshine the shallow flats 

 were alive with bird life. Gulls, both the gray-hooded and 

 the black-backed, screamed harshly overhead. The chest- 

 nut-colored lily trotters tripped daintily over the lily pads, 

 and when they flew, held their long legs straight behind 

 them, so that they looked as if they had tails like pheasants. 

 Sacred ibis, white with naked black head and neck, stalked 

 along the edge of the water, and on the bent papyrus small 

 cormorants and herons perched. Everywhere there were 

 coots and ducks, and crested grebes, big and little. Huge 



