148 THE GAME OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA. 



your outward trip, it is obvious that to return to camp it is not necessary to cross 

 it again, but that if you do cross it again once, then you must also cross it a 

 second time. It will not always be easy in thick country to tell if you are crossing 

 the same watercourse twice (it having taken a bend round), or if you are crossing a 

 second watercourse. By keeping a careful note of the fall and trend of the country, 

 however, you will generally be able to tell. In connection with this there is another very 

 elementary rule which often seems to be lost sight of. It is, that if you cross a 

 watercourse flowing from your right to your left, in whatever position you next meet 

 with the same watercourse and cross it, it must then be flowing from your left to your 

 right. If the second watercourse met with is also flowing from your right to your 

 left, it cannot be the same one, but must be another. A careful relegation to memory 

 of all the watercourses crossed during a day, and the direction in which they flow, 

 both by general compass bearing and whether from right to left or left to right of 

 your course, is one of the most important aids in finding your way about a thick bush 

 country. If there is a hill overlooking a bush country in which you intend to hunt, it 

 would be as well to take an early opportunity of ascending it, and thus of learning as 

 much as possible of the lie of the country. Down below, in the midst of the bush, you 

 are in the position of one in a maze ; but after ascending a hill from which a good 

 view is to be had, you are in the position of one who has a chart of the maze put into 

 his hands. You may come to a series of turnings or glades, one of which leads by an 

 easy and open path to the spot to which you wish to go, whilst the remainder either 

 wind and turn off or end in culs de sac. It is obviously impossible to tell which is 

 the right one till you have tried. 



Some of the watercourses are so thickly wooded with thorns and undergrowth 

 and so broken up with nullahs that it may take an hour or so forcing a way through 

 quite a narrow belt of enveloping bush. If you must cross one of these in an 

 unknown country it saves time and trouble to move parallel with the course, but at a 

 sufficient distance from it to avoid the thick undergrowth, until you meet with game 

 tracks leading down to it. These probably lead to a feasible crossing, and as likely 

 as not to a place where the bush narrows on either side, something in form like the 

 handle of a dumbbell. At worst the tracks must lead to the water or to what in the 

 wet season would be a pool in the river-bed. If, having arrived there, you find that 

 the track returns and does not cross, you have at least performed half the crossing 

 without serious difficulty, and it only remains to push your way from the stream-bed 

 through the belt of undergrowth on the opposite side. 



Where a stretch of bush is found on the edge of a plain you have the advantage 

 of being able to camp near the plain, and from there you can make a detour in the 



