The Journal of a Sporting Nomad 
supple and easily bent to be of any real use as a 
walking-stick. The Dutchmen use pieces of 
this hide for whips, bruising with a stone the 
last two or three inches of the whip, which 
breaks down the fibre. The teeth of the 
hippo were formerly in great demand for 
making small articles of ivory, for it is ex- 
tremely hard. The two tushes of a big bull are 
shaped very much like a boar’s tusks, and when 
mounted make quite a handsome arch, on which 
a small gong or similar ornament may be hung. 
These tushes are often very discoloured when 
freshly taken from the beast’s jaws. They may 
be cleaned and made much whiter by rubbing 
them vigorously with diluted hydrochloric acid. 
Buck and game generally were scarce in this 
immediate vicinity, so I took my Paradox shot- 
gun and went to a marsh where I had flushed 
some snipe a day or so previously. Here I got 
two couples of snipe, two Egyptian geese, whose 
skins I saved, as I wanted them for winging 
artificial mayflies, and two spur-winged geese. 
These latter were fine birds, one of them giving 
my boys a great hunt before they got him, as 
the tip of his wing only was broken. The snipe 
we ate, but my cook made a mistake in that he 
‘‘ drew’? them, so we might as well have been 
eating sparrows for all the taste they had. 
When returning to camp I passed a lot of palm 
trees whose tops had been cut off completely. 
128 
