174 rHE GAME Ol' BRITISH EAST AFRICA. 



particular track, it will probably lead you for a while through similar easy country. 

 It will be best to follow up without wasting too much time, though still using of 

 course all the care compatible with an advance not too slow, for it may be assumed 

 in such country that the animal was feeding at night, so will be some distance 

 ahead. When the track begins to take to the thicker and more tangled country, such 

 as may be found on the little hills in the forest or alongside the watercourses and in 

 nullahs, then is the time to begin to follow in earnest. It will be necessary for you 

 to exercise all possible care and to proceed stealthily and noiselessly. Every step 

 will have to be tested before the foot is put down, to learn if the twigs will crack or 

 not. Every branch will have to be carefully pressed back as you pass and replaced 

 with the same caution afterwards to prevent rustlings. Creepers will have to be 

 lifted over your head and brambles unhooked from your clothing. However careful 

 may be your advance there will always be every now and again some twig that will 

 scrunch or some decayed piece of timber that will collapse as you climb over it. 

 Very back-aching work it will be found besides, for what with crossing branches and 

 creepers, etc., you will hardly ever find a place in which you can stand upright. The 

 path you will be following will be one that has been forced through the undergrowth 

 by an animal of much less stature than yourself, and one, moreover, adapted by nature 

 to make itself into the shape of a wedge, so that it can push through overhanging 

 obstacles. 



Some of the places through which a bongo or a forest-hog have passed it is 

 quite impossible to conceive how such a large animal managed to get through. It is 

 the great body-weight however that has been turned to account, and the branches 

 and creepers have fallen back again into their old places after the animal has passed. 



During the uncomfortable process of squeezing yourself along your selected 

 narrow trackway, and crouching or crawling under obstacles, or unhooking yourself 

 from thorns, you will have cause to think often and bitterly of the unadaptibility of 

 the ordinary human frame for passing through such country. The human foot 

 appears as if it was specially designed to hook into every creeper and trailer in the 

 path so as to trip one up, and the human back does not appear to be endowed with 

 the suppleness necessary to bend in and out from under overhanging branches. 

 Moreover, the human skin is absurdly sensitive to the thorns and noxious plants met 

 with in the way, and the human head does not seem to be designed for pushing itself 

 into thick places in advance of the body. 



The great secret of going quietly in pursuit of an animal is to go slowly. 

 However slowly you may have to go it is better than going a little faster and 

 making a little more noise. Your quarry must be lying down, and if it is lying near, 



