350 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



Soon after dark the hyenas began to gather at the carcasses 

 and to quarrel among themselves as they gorged. Toward 

 morning a lion came near and uttered a kind of booming, 

 long-drawn moan, an ominous and menacing sound. The 

 hyenas answered with an extraordinary chorus of yelling, 

 howling, laughing, and chuckling, as weird a volume of 

 noise as any to which I ever listened. At dawn we stole 

 down to the carcasses in the faint hope of a shot at the lion. 

 However, he was not there; but as we came toward one 

 carcass a hyena raised its head seemingly from beside the 

 elephant's belly, and I brained it with the little Spring- 

 field. On walking up it appeared that I need not have 

 shot at all. The hyena, which was swollen with elephant 

 meat, had gotten inside the huge body, and had then bit- 

 ten a hole through the abdominal wall of tough muscle and 

 thrust his head through. The wedge-shaped head had 

 slipped through the hole all right, but the muscle had then 

 contracted, and the hyena was fairly caught, with its body 

 inside the elephant's belly, and its head thrust out through 

 the hole. We took several photos of the beast in its queer 

 trap. 



After breakfast we rode back to our camp by the swamp. 

 Akeley and Clark were working hard at the elephant skins; 

 but Mrs. Akeley, Stevenson, and McCutcheon took lunch 

 with us at our camp. They had been having a very success- 

 ful hunt; Mrs. Akeley had to her credit a fine maned lion 

 and a bull elephant with enormous tusks. This was the 

 first safari we had met while we were out in the field; though 

 in Nairobi, and once or twice at outlying bomas, we had 

 met men about to start on, or returning from, expeditions; 

 and as we marched into Meru we encountered the safari of 



