SPORT IN MOZAMBIQUE 



So soon as you withdraw yourself from the carcase, 

 carrying with you what you have selected, all this 

 winged host descends, crowding, pecking, and quar- 

 relling. If the wounded animal dies far from you, 

 run, for in a short time nothing of it will remain. 

 The vultures, after having pecked out the eyes, attack 

 the vent, making a way into the body by this orifice 

 eating the soft internal parts and picking the bones, 

 so that when you arrive you find nothing but a skin 

 spread over a perfectly anatomised skeleton. I have 

 seen a flock of several hundred vultures clean the 

 carcase of a zebra in twenty minutes. 



In the course of one of my wanderings I missed a 

 species of small otter with a black coat, which appeared 

 to me very pretty ; and I regret this the more because 

 I have seen the animal only twice. 1 There exists 

 another and common kind of fair size, with a brown 

 coat, which lives all along the rivers, and which the 

 natives often take in their baskets, where they intro- 

 duce them to catch fish. They designate this latter 

 species bizi. 



The same day I experience a tiresome misadventure. 

 I approach a herd of buffaloes, and shoot a bull, which 

 appears to me to have its shoulder-blades broken. 

 Passing near by, I make a sign to the negroes follow- 

 ing me to despatch it, and I walk on in front to fire 

 at a second beast in the herd, which has halted. 

 I hear a frightful row and see the wounded beast 



1 Apparently the so-called otter-shrew (Potamogale velox). [Ed.] 

 (60) 



