170 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



occasion, after they had made up their loads, they danced 

 in a ring for half an hour, two tin cans being beaten as 

 tomtoms. Then off they strode in a long line with their 

 burdens, following one another in Indian file, each greet- 

 ing me with a smile and a deep "Yambo, Bwana!" as 

 he passed. I had grown attached to them, and of course 

 especially to my tent boys gun-bearers, and saises, who quite 

 touched me by their evident pleasure in coming to see me 

 and greet me if I happened to be away from them for two 

 or three days. 



Kermit and I rode off with Heatley to pass the night at 

 his house. This was at the other end of his farm, in a 

 totally different kind of country, a country of wooded hills, 

 with glades and dells and long green grass in the valleys. 

 It did not in the least resemble what one would naturally 

 expect in equatorial Africa. On the contrary it reminded 

 me of the beautiful rolling wooded country of middle Wis- 

 consin. But of course everything was really different. There 

 were monkeys and leopards in the forests, and we saw 

 whydah birds of a new kind, with red on the head and 

 throat, and brilliantly colored woodpeckers, and black-and- 

 gold weaver-birds. Indeed, the wealth of bird life was 

 such that it cannot be described. Here, too, there were 

 many birds with musical voices, to which we listened in the 

 early morning. The best timber was yielded by the tall 

 mahogo-tree, a kind of sandal-wood. This was the tree 

 selected by the wild fig for its deadly embrace. The wild 

 fig begins as a huge parasitic vine, and ends as one of the 

 largest and most stately, and also one of the greenest and 

 most shady, trees in this part of Africa. It grows up the 

 mahogo as a vine and gradually, by branching, and by the 

 spreading of the branches, completely envelops the trunk 

 and also grows along each limb, and sends out great limbs 

 of its own. Every stage can be seen, from that in which 

 the big vine has begun to grow up along the still flourishing 

 mahogo, through that in which the tree looks like a curious 

 composite, the limbs and thick foliage of the fig branching 



