158 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



out into the open to feed at night. But Heatley, though 

 he himself had killed a couple of bulls, and the Boer farmer 

 who was working for him another, had preserved the herd 

 from outside molestation, and their habits were doubtless 

 much what they would have been in regions where man is 

 a rare visitor. 



The first day we were on Heatley's farm, we saw the 

 buffalo, to the number of seventy or eighty, grazing in the 

 open, some hundreds of yards from the papyrus swamp, 

 and this shortly after noon. For a mile from the papyrus 

 swamp the country was an absolutely flat plain, gradually 

 rising into a gentle slope, and it was an impossibility to 

 approach the buffalo across this plain save in one way to 

 be mentioned hereafter. Probably when the moon was 

 full the buffalo came out to graze by night. But while we 

 were on our hunt the moon was young, and the buffalo 

 evidently spent most of the night in the papyrus, and came 

 out to graze by day. Sometimes they came out in the early 

 morning, sometimes in the late evening, but quite as often 

 in the bright daylight. We saw herds come out to graze at 

 ten o'clock in the morning, and again at three in the after- 

 noon. They usually remained out several hours, first graz- 

 ing and then lying down. Flocks of the small white cow- 

 heron usually accompanied them, the birds stalking about 

 among them or perching on their backs; and occasionally 

 the whereabouts of the herd in the papyrus swamp could 

 be determined by seeing the flock of herons perched on the 

 papyrus tops. We did not see any of the red-billed tick- 

 birds on the buffalo; indeed, the only ones that we saw in 

 this neighborhood happened to be on domestic cattle in 

 other places we found them very common on rhinoceros. At 

 night the buffalo sometimes came right into the cultivated 

 fields, and even into the garden close by the Boer farmer's 

 house; and once at night he had shot a bull. The bullet 

 went through the heart but the animal ran to the papyrus 

 swamp, and was found next day dead just within the edge. 

 Usually the main herd, of bulls, cows, and calves, kept to- 



