Vultures and Adjutant Bird 
that Cooe was carrying. I saw a good bull, 
which I decided to take, leaving Weddell to 
look after himself. Just as I fired, a cow 
ranged up alongside the beast I had determined 
on. It was all done so quickly that I fired un- 
intentionally, killing her dead on the spot. The 
bull got my left-hand barrel as he moved off, but 
I hit him a little too far back to be immediately 
fatal. He turned out of the herd, entering a 
patch of reeds that formed the apex of a triangle. 
Weddell had killed a good bull with his °577 
Express, so we went up to the place where my 
bull had disappeared. Blood was sprinkled all 
over the grass and on the outside of the reeds. 
I was within ten yards of his hiding-place when 
I heard the reeds crackling, then directly after- 
wards out he came into the open. Now, it was 
any odds that he would have charged me, as 
I was directly in front of him, but strange to 
relate, he turned off at right angles, following the 
path that the rest of the herd had taken. I fired 
again at him as he turned, but made an extra- 
ordinary mess of things, for instead of hitting 
him as I intended, behind the shoulder, I hit 
him in the back of the horn by the base of his 
ear. Bad shot though it was, he fell as though 
he had been poleaxed and quite dead. On 
approaching him I saw what a blow the bullet 
had dealt. The horn where it was struck was 
smashed into a pulp—I could have put my fist 
135 
