444 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



Hudsonian chickadees of the North Woods I never saw 

 such tame little birds. 



At Gondokoro we met the boat which the Sirdar, Major 

 General Sir Reginald Wingate, had sent to take us down 

 the Nile to Khartoum; for he, and all the Soudan officials 

 including especially Colonel Asser, Colonel Owen, Slatin 

 Pasha, and Butler Bey treated us with a courtesy for 

 which I cannot too strongly express my appreciation. In 

 the boat we were to have met an old friend and fellow 

 countryman, Leigh Hunt; to our great regret he could 

 not meet us, but he insisted on treating us as his guests, 

 and on our way down the Nile we felt as if we were on the 

 most comfortable kind of yachting trip; and everything 

 was done for us by Captain Middleton, the Scotch en- 

 gineer in charge. 



Nor was our debt only to British officials and to Ameri- 

 can friends. At Gondokoro I was met by M. Ranquet, the 

 Belgian Commandant of the Lado district and, both he 

 and M. Massart, the Chef de Poste at Redjaf, were kind- 

 ness itself, and aided us in every way. 



From Gondokoro Kermit and I crossed to Redjaf, for 

 an eight days' trip after the largest and handsomest, and one 

 of the least known, of African antelopes, the giant eland. 

 We went alone, because all the other white men of the 

 party were down with dysentery or fever. We had with us 

 sixty Uganda porters and a dozen mules sent us by the 

 Sirdar, together with a couple of our little riding mules, 

 which we used now and then for a couple of hours on safari, 

 or in getting to the actual hunting ground. As always 

 when only one or two of us went, or when the safari was 

 short, we travelled light, with no dining-tent and nothing 



