96 THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY 



August 15. — Sent men back to last camp to bring up 

 potio loads we had been forced to leave. From the top 

 of the mountain we had, the day before, seen a patch 

 of green grass back among the hills. We went toward 

 this. A very high wind blew. Going over a grassy 

 shoulder of the hills, single file among some thickets, 

 Cuninghame ahead, suddenly a bushbuck doe sprang 

 out and stood sidewise forty yards away. Cuning- 

 hame dropped flat, his arms over his ears, and I, firing 

 over him, put a .405 in her shoulder. Very hard animal 

 to get, as they are mostly invisible in heavy cover. I 

 have a buck and want a doe. 



The green country on the slopes below the moun- 

 tains we found inhabited by great herds of game, 

 but extraordinarily wild. Through the thin growth of 

 small trees with which all this country is sparsely 

 covered we could see them disappearing at the mere 

 first small glimpse of us. This puzzled us, but we 

 gradually evolved the theory that game usually de- 

 pend on hearing and smell rather than sight, but that 

 when the two former senses are nulHfied by the wind, 

 then they revert to the other. In fact they dashed 

 off in exactly the headlong manner of game that has 

 winded a man. This theory of the substitution of one 

 sense for another was fully proved by the fact that 

 next day, no wind blowing at all, we went back to the 

 same place and found all the animals very tame. 

 They could now revert for protection to their usual 



