312 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



inghame and I would spend the day hunting in the waterless 

 country back of the river, where the heat at mid-day was 

 terrific. We might not reach camp until after nightfall. 

 Once as we came to it in the dark it seemed as if ghostly 

 arms stretched above it; for on this evening the tents had 

 been pitched under trees up which huge rubber vines had 

 climbed, and their massive dead-white trunks and branches 

 glimmered pale and ghostly in the darkness. 



Twice my gun-bearers tried to show me a cheetah; but 

 my eyes were too slow to catch the animal before it bounded 

 off in safety among the bushes. Another time after an ex- 

 cellent bit of tracking, the gun-bearers brought me up to a 

 buffalo bull, standing for his noonday rest in the leafless 

 thorns a mile from the river. I thought I held the heavy 

 Holland straight for his shoulder, but I must have fired 

 high; for though he fell to the shot he recovered at once. 

 We followed the blood spoor for an hour, the last part of 

 the time when the trail wandered among and through the 

 heavy thickets under the trees on the river banks; here I 

 walked beside the tracker with my rifle at full cock, for we 

 could not tell what instant we might be charged. But his 

 trail finally crossed the river, and as he was going stronger 

 and stronger we had to abandon the chase. In the water- 

 less country, away from the river, we found little except 

 herds of zebra, of both kinds, occasional oryx and eland, and 

 a few giraffe. A stallion of the big kangani zebra which I 

 shot stood fourteen hands high at the withers and weighed 

 about eight hundred and thirty pounds,* according to the 



* The aggregate of the weights of the different pieces was 778 pounds; the loss of 

 blood and the drying of the pieces of flesh in the intense heat of the sun we thought 

 certainly accounted for 50 pounds more. The stallion was not fat. At any rate 

 it weighed between 800 and 850 pounds. Its testicles, though fully developed, had 



