THE GUASO NYERO 293 



north toward the Guaso Nyero. Heller was under the 

 weather, and we left him to spend a few days at Meru 

 boma, and then to take in the elephant skins and other 

 museum specimens to Nairobi. 



As Cuninghame and I were to be nearly four weeks in 

 a country with no food supplies, we took a small donkey 

 safari to carry the extra food for our porters for in these 

 remote places the difficulty of taking in many hundred 

 pounds of salt, as well as skin tents, and the difficulty 

 of bringing out the skeletons and skins of the big animals 

 collected, make such an expedition as ours, undertaken 

 for scientific purposes, far more cumbersome and unwieldy 

 than a mere hunting trip, or even than a voyage of explo- 

 ration, and trebles the labor. 



A long day's march brought us down to the hot country. 

 That evening we pitched our tents by a rapid brook, bor- 

 dered by palms, whose long, stiff fronds rustled ceaselessly 

 in the wind. Monkeys swung in the tree tops. On the 

 march I shot a Kavirondo crane on the wing with the little 

 Springfield, almost exactly repeating my experience with 

 the other crane which I had shot three weeks before, ex- 

 cept that on this occasion I brought down the bird with 

 my third bullet, and then wasted the last two cartridges in 

 the magazine at his companions. At dusk the donkeys 

 were driven to a fire within the camp, and they stood pa- 

 tiently round it in a circle throughout the night, safe from 

 lions and hyenas. 



Next day's march brought us to another small tributary 

 of the Guaso Nyero, a little stream twisting rapidly through 

 the plain, between sheer banks. Here and there it was 

 edged with palms and beds of bulrushes. We pitched the 



