The Journal of a Sporting Nomad 



supple and easily bent to be of any real use as a 

 walking-stick. The Dutchmen use pieces of 

 this hide for whips, bruising with a stone the 

 last two or three inches of the whip, which 

 breaks down the fibre. The teeth of the 

 hippo were formerly in great demand for 

 making small articles of ivory, for it is ex- 

 tremely hard. The two tushes of a big bull are 

 shaped very much like a boar's tusks, and when 

 mounted make quite a handsome arch, on which 

 a small gong or similar ornament may be hung. 

 These tushes are often very discoloured when 

 freshly taken from the beast's jaws. They may 

 be cleaned and made much whiter by rubbing 

 them vigorously with diluted hydrochloric acid. 

 Buck and game generally were scarce in this 

 immediate vicinity, so I took my Paradox shot- 

 gun and went to a marsh where I had flushed 

 some snipe a day or so previously. Here I got 

 two couples of snipe, two Egyptian geese, whose 

 skins I saved, as I wanted them for winging 

 artificial mayflies, and two spur-winged geese. 

 These latter were fine birds, one of them giving 

 my boys a great hunt before they got him, as 

 the tip of his wing only was broken. The snipe 

 we ate, but my cook made a mistake in that he 

 " drew " them, so we might as well have been 

 eating sparrows for all the taste they had. 

 When returning to camp I passed a lot of palm 

 trees whose tops had been cut off completely. 



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