HUNTING IN AFRICA 109 
and .600 bore expresses are cumbersome and very unsat- 
isfactory weapons. A .450 double Cordite express will 
kill anything in the country, but you will be wise to use 
constantly a much lighter gun, and one with ammunition 
easier to carry. The rifle question needs a page or two to 
itself. 
One of the most important matters, as I have found it, 
and one never insisted on in any books, seldom mentioned 
by any hunter, is to so regulate the marching of your 
sefari, when you are changing ground, that there will be 
time for a quiet inspection of the country, the evening you 
make camp. 
A sefari is at best a noisy affair. Forty toa hundred men 
will make a noise when they reach their resting-place. 
Tent-pitching, wood-gathering, very often from a distance 
of a mile or more, cooking and water-hunting and carrying, 
all mean noise. Game may be found that same evening 
of arrival, within half a mile or more of your tent, which 
next morning you may seek in vain at five miles distance. 
The rule is a good one, start at daybreak, and camp before 
noon. ‘The early hours are the coolest, six hours of hard, 
stony or thorny ground with sixty pounds, often more, to 
carry, is all a humane man should ask of his porters. 
To rush from place to place does no good, tires your sefari 
out, and if there are many other hunting parties in the 
country, is apt to make you deservedly disliked. 
Never under any circumstances give up an animal you 
have wounded, unless night is falling, or you are utterly 
done and can go no farther. In that case give your rifle 
to your head gunboy and promise him ‘“‘bakshish” if 
he brings in head and meat. 
Perhaps even mentioning such a matter seems useless 
to many, I wish it were so. But to see, as I have often 
seen, poor wounded zebra, kongoni, or many another, 
limping painfully after the herd, with month-old wounds. 
