140 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



and in all the tender places. McMillan sent out an ox 

 wagon and brought it in to the house, where we weighed it. 

 It was a little over two thousand two hundred pounds. 

 It had evidently been in the neighborhood in which we 

 found it for a considerable time, for a few hundred yards 

 away we found its stamping ground, a circular spot where 

 the earth had been all trampled up and kicked about, ac- 

 cording to the custom of rhinoceroses; they return day 

 after day to such places to deposit their dung, which is then 

 kicked about with the hind feet. As with all our other 

 specimens, the skin was taken off and sent back to the 

 National Museum. The stomach was filled with leaves 

 and twigs, this kind of rhinoceros browsing on the tips of 

 the branches by means of its hooked, prehensile upper lip. 

 Now I did not want to kill this rhinoceros, and I am 

 not certain that it really intended to charge us. It may 

 very well be that if we had stood firm it would, after much 

 threatening and snorting, have turned and made off; vet- 

 eran hunters like Selous could, I doubt not, have afforded 

 to wait and see what happened. But I let it get within forty 

 yards, and it still showed every symptom of meaning mis- 

 chief, and at a shorter range I could not have been sure of 

 stopping it in time. Often under such circumstances the 

 rhino does not mean to charge at all, and is acting in a 

 spirit of truculent and dull curiosity; but often, when its 

 motions and actions are indistinguishable from those of an 

 animal which does not mean mischief, it turns out that a 

 given rhino does mean mischief. A year before I arrived 

 in East Africa a surveyor was charged by a rhinoceros 

 entirely without provocation; he was caught and killed. 

 Chanler's companion on his long expedition, the Austrian 

 Von Hbhnel, was very severely wounded by a rhino and 

 nearly died; the animal charged through the line of march 

 of the safari, and then deliberately turned, hunted down 

 Von Hohnel, and tossed him. Again and again there have 

 been such experiences, and again and again hunters who 

 did not wish to kill rhinos have been forced to do so in 



