CHAPTER VIII 



ONE AFRICAN DAY 



On the evening of October 16th, 1913, we reached 

 the Amala ^ River after a long trek of sixteen miles 

 across the open Lemik plain, where we saw a few 

 Wildebeest, Topi, Thomson's Gazelle and Grant's 

 Gazelle. Since October 6th, when we left Kijabe 

 on the Uganda railway, we had been going hard, 

 mostly over a waterless and somewhat gameless 

 country, except in the Kedong and when we had 

 crossed the Loita plains, where Thomson's and 

 Grant's Gazelle and Ostrich were very abundant. 

 We had not stopped to hunt, but on the way my 

 friend H. Pullar had killed a couple of splendid 

 Grants in the Kedong, one a beauty almost twenty- 

 nine inches, and I had shot a couple of good Thom- 

 son's Gazelle and an Abyssinian Duiker. Crossing 

 the high Mau escarpment, I had suffered consider- 

 able pain in the walls of my right lung — ^the result 

 of an old trouble in Alaska — and feared that I 

 was in for a bad time, but as we descended to the 

 Amala and the warmer region of the Victoria 

 Nyanza these symptoms disappeared, and I was 

 soon in the best of health, and able to enjoy the 

 hunting. H. Pullar' s hunter, William Judd, one 

 of the most charming of men and best of hunters, 



^ Sometimes called the Mara. 

 191 



