SEFARI LIFE 155 
mother’s hut by the lake, one hundred and fifty miles away. 
Most porters would have immediately spent a large sum 
(for them) in buying a ticket on the next train, and so impress- 
ing their relatives with their importance. 
Before closing this chapter, which is nothing if not 
practical, I will add some hints about food which every 
traveller knows to be an important subject, and in Africa, 
is doubly important, since good food is not always easily 
obtained, while the trying climate renders it peculiarly 
necessary. 
I was prepared to put up with poor meat. I was told 
‘African meat is dry and tasteless, and has small nourish- 
ment in it.” I must admit that much game meat is very 
poor stuff; that no meat compares for a moment with the flesh 
of our own wild animals, fed on the short bunch grass of 
the prairie, or mountain. You never see a bit of rich, 
brown fat on anything, or indeed, any fat at all, except ona 
hippo or a lion, which, well, smells! or a cow eland (which 
you cannot shoot now, though you could a few years ago). 
But though all game meat here is unaccountably thin, one 
of the chief reasons it eats so badly is that everyone in the 
country seems possessed with the idea that it cannot be kept 
but must be cooked at once, or at most in twenty-four hours. 
When I first began to spend my holidays after big game 
in our Eastern woods or Western mountains, I encoun- 
tered precisely the same prejudice —and it was not till 
I made my men use gunny sacks for the meat I wanted for 
myself, and saw it hung in the shade, safe in its rough cov- 
ering from flies, but open to the air, that I succeeded in 
convincing my experienced companions that meat could be 
kept, when properly butchered, often as long as ten days, 
and yet remain sound and sweet. So kept and hung, there 
is no meat game in the world that can compare with our 
blacktail, wapiti, or mountain sheep. Now, though no 
cleanliness in preparing, or carefulness in hanging African 
