of tbe 1Rofc, IRifle, ant) (Bun 



He hated the idea of taking advantage of an un- 

 suspicious beast, however savage and dangerous. He 

 scorned that watching by moonlight for wild beasts 

 coming to drink in which Gordon Gumming and other 

 big game hunters indulged. " It is," he writes, " a sort 

 of midnight murder, and many a poor brute who 

 comes to the silent pool to cool his parched tongue 

 finds only a cup of bitterness, and retires again to 

 his jungle to die a lingering death frorn some unskilful 

 wound." There was no unskilful wounding when 

 Samuel Baker shot. He slew every tiger that he ever 

 fired at, and two-and-twenty of them fell to his rifle. 

 Of the scores of elephants, buffaloes, lions, leopards, 

 rhinoceroses, hippopotami, bears, elk, and lesser deer 

 at which he pulled trigger, more than 90 per cent, 

 were bagged. His shooting was deadly. On several 

 occasions he brought down a black partridge or a 

 pea-fowl on the wing with a single bullet at a 

 distance of sixty or seventy yards. But he did not 

 believe much in long shots either with gun or rifle. 

 On this subject he writes : 



" In narrating long shots that I have made, I recount 

 them as bright moments in the hours of sport ; they 

 are the exceptions and not the rule. I consider a 

 man a first-rate shot who can always bag his deer 

 standing at eighty yards, or running at fifty. Hitting 

 and bagging are widely different. If a man can 

 always bag at the distance that I have named he will 

 constantly hit, and frequently bag, at extraordinary 

 ranges, as there is no doubt of his shooting, and, when 

 he misses, the ball has whizzed somewhere very close 



