THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 409 



came out and camped by this rhino, to handle the skin and 

 skeleton. In the middle of the night a leopard got caught 

 in one of his small steel traps, which he had set out with a 

 light drag. The beast made a terrific row and went off 

 with the trap and drag. It was only caught by one toe; 

 a hyena similarly caught would have wrenched itself 

 loose; but the leopard, though a far braver and more dan- 

 gerous beast, has less fortitude under pain than a hyena. 

 Heller tracked it up in the morning, and shot it as, ham- 

 pered by the trap and drag, it charged the porters. 



On the ashes of the fresh burn the footprints of the 

 game showed almost as distinctly as on snow. One morn- 

 ing we saw where a herd of elephant, cows and calves, 

 had come down the night before to drink at a big bay of 

 the Nile, three or four miles north of our camp. Numerous 

 hippo tracks showed that during the darkness these beasts 

 wandered freely a mile or two inland. They often wan- 

 dered back of our camp at night. Always beside these night 

 trails we found withered remnants of water cabbage and 

 other aquatic plants which they had carried inland with 

 them; I suppose accidentally on their backs. On several 

 occasions where we could only make out scrapes on the 

 ground the hippo trails puzzled us, being so far inland that 

 we thought they might be those of rhinos; until we would 

 come on some patch of ashes or of soft soil where we could 

 trace the four toe marks. The rhino has but three toes, the 

 one in the middle being very big; it belongs, with the 

 tapir and horse, to the group of ungulates which tends to 

 develop one digit of each foot at the expense of all the 

 others; a group which in a long-past geological age was the 

 predominant ungulate group of the world. The hippo, 



