THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY 69 



without bending his knees, and drank; which shows he 

 was a limber old gentleman after all! 



We lay in the thicket for an hour. A rhino came and 

 sniffed at us ten yards away, but decided to depart. I 

 had sufficient amusement watching the various birds. 

 Of course nothing happened. On the way home, as we 

 needed meat badly, I killed an impalla buck at 210 

 yards with the .465 — a good deal like taking a club to a 

 butterfly. 



Two hours twenty minutes; 5 J miles; elevation, 

 2,000; morning, 60; noon, 86; night, 66. 



August I. — Having no faith whatever in the old 

 gentleman's system, we resolved to hunt buffalo our 

 own way, viz. : search for fresh spoor and then follow it 

 until something happened. Accordingly we returned 

 to the swamp, waded it, and begun to cast about on the 

 other side. By 7 130 we had found tracks of a bull, and 

 for two hours we puzzled along them. The ground 

 was hard and confused with all sorts of other tracks 

 new and old. The men were often at fault, and by 

 9 130 we had followed the brute only about half a mile. 

 The spoor led across a small opening, through a fringe 

 of sparse brush, and apparently to a distant thicket. 

 Eleven giraffe ambled across in front of us in single 

 file. The spoor finally led past a dark ant heap under 

 an isolated small tree in high grass. When only thirty 

 yards from the ant heap, I saw it heave slightly and 

 suddenly recognized it as the curve of the buffalo's 



