HUNTING THE RHINOCEROS 



Colonel Roosevelt Reported Killed by a Rhinoceros — Exciting Fight with This 

 Ferocious Beast — The Natives Praise Bwana Tumbo — Interesting Facts About 

 the Rhinoceros. 



• Early in November tlie telegraph wires flashed the exciting news to all 

 parts of the civilized world that Colonel Roosevelt, the now famous game 

 slayer, had been killed by a rhinoceros while hunting on the Guas Ingishu 

 Plateau in the Kisumu pi-ovince of British East Africa. It is known that the 

 rhinoceros hunt is a dangerous pastime and that scores of European sports- 

 men have lost their lives in pursuing this ferocious brute. No wonder, then, 

 if all Mr. Roosevelt's friends felt uneasy when this story reached them. Mrs. 

 Roosevelt received the news, and notwithstanding the unlikelihood of the 

 truth of the report and successive denials, she spent several days and nights 

 of intense anxiety, scarcely closing her eyes and saying over and over again, 

 "It is not true; I do not believe it." 



But at the next moment she was imagining all kinds of horrors and feel- 

 ing that she could not be tranquil until she really heard from her husband 

 directly. 



Meanwhile neither the Colonial office in London nor the State Depart- 

 ment at Washington, nor the Smithsonian Institution, where inquiries were 

 made, had got any information about the rumored accident. Messages were 

 dispatched to the telegraph nearest the hunting party, and at last the follow- 

 ing reassuring news was received over the transatlantic cable from the British 

 commissioner at Eldama : "Roosevelt was in excellent health October 23 

 and news of the party received October 30 reported all well. If anyone in the 

 party is sick we, the nearest medical help, have received no news of such 

 sickness." 



While this story, which probably had been let out by New York financiers, 

 was setting the whole world afire, the Colonel was beating the bush in the 

 Eldama ravine in search of bergo, a rare specimen of antelope, which no white 

 man ever has bagged, and as one of his black-skinned beaters put it, "No 

 rhino get Bwana Tumbo," adding with a broad grin : "Bwana Tumbo get 

 rhino quicker." 



Nevertheless the rumor might have been true, for the two-horned rhi- 

 noceros of East Africa is a niost dangerous beast. The Colonel has bagged 



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