328 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



No great enthusiasm in the reader can be roused by such 

 a statement as " this day walked twenty-three miles, shot 

 one giraffe and two zebras ; porter deserted with the load 

 containing the spare boots " ; and the most exciting 

 events, if chronicled simply as " shot three rhinos and two 

 buffalo; the first rhino and both buffalo charged," become 

 about as thrilling as a paragraph in Baedeker. There 

 is no need of additional literature of the guide-book and 

 cookery-book kind. " Fine writing " is, of course, ab- 

 horrent in a way that is not possible for mere baldness of 

 statement, and would-be " funny " writing is even worse, 

 as it almost invariably denotes an underbred quality of 

 mind; but there is need of a certain amount of detail, and 

 of vivid and graphic, though simple, description. In 

 other words, the writer on big game should avoid equally 

 Carlyle's theory and Carlyle's practice in the matter of 

 verbosity. Really good game books are sure to contain 

 descriptions which linger in the mind just like one's pet 

 passages in any other good book. One example is Selous' 

 account of his night watch close to the wagon, when in 

 the pitchy darkness he killed three of the five lions which 

 had attacked his oxen; or his extraordinary experience 

 while hunting elephants on a stallion which turned sulky, 

 and declined to gallop out of danger. The same is true 

 of Drummond's descriptions of the camps of native hunt- 

 ing parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the 

 reeds, and of waiting for rhinos by a desert pool under the 

 brilliancy of the South African moon; descriptions, by 

 the way, which show that the power of writing interest- 

 ingly is not dependent upon even approximate correctness 



