PREFACE 



WHEN still a child, forty years ago, I was 

 taught to hold a gun and try not to be 

 afraid when the bigger folk with me were 

 hunting bear and tiger in India. During the last 

 twenty years a notebook and camera have gone 

 with the guns, but so far none of the diaries of 

 these fifteen hunting trips have been published. 

 This book, taken largely from the last diary, was 

 written in Dublin, simply to wile away the long- 

 curfew hours of waiting and suspense of an officer's 

 life in Ireland. What to me was a curfew task 

 may be of value as the first work published in 

 English for fifty years on Angola, a wonderful 

 African colony, with vast bracing uplands and 

 wealth in its many resources, a fauna of rare 

 animals, a flora of many beautiful plants, and 

 great promise of future colonization and commerce. 

 It was at an Angolan port that Livingstone, 

 my boyhood's hero, and the bravest yet gentlest 

 of all explorers, ended his first great African 

 journey in 1853, and as my first African journey, 

 made many years ago, had been a pilgrimage to 

 where his heart lies buried at Lake Banguelo, 



