260 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



panions. Without any warning they would suddenly start 

 a song or chant, usually an impromptu recitative of what- 

 ever at the moment interested them. They chanted for 

 half an hour over the feat of the "Bwana Makuba" (great 

 master or chief, my name) in killing the hippo; laying 

 especial stress upon the quantity of excellent meat it would 

 furnish, and how very good the eating would be. Usually 

 one would improvise the chant, and the other join in the 

 chorus. Sometimes they would solemnly sing compliment- 

 ary songs to one another, each in turn chanting the man- 

 ifold good qualities of his companion. 



Around this camp were many birds. The most note- 

 worthy was a handsome gray eagle owl, bigger than our 

 great horned owl, to which it is closely akin. It did not 

 hoot or scream, its voice being a kind of grunt, followed in 

 a second or two by a succession of similar sounds, uttered 

 more quickly and in a lower tone. These big owls fre- 

 quently came round camp after dark, and at first their 

 notes completely puzzled me, as I thought they must be 

 made by some beast. The bulbuls sang well. Most of 

 the birds were in no way like our home birds. 



Loring trapped quantities of mice and rats, and it was 

 curious to see how many of them had acquired characters 

 which caused them superficially to resemble American 

 animals with which they had no real kinship. The sand 

 rats that burrowed in the dry plains were in shape, in color, 

 eyes, tail, and paws strikingly like our pocket gophers, 

 which have similar habits. So the long-tailed gerbilles, 

 or gerbille-like rats, resembled our kangaroo rats; and 

 there was a blunt-nosed, stubby-tailed little rat superficially 

 hardly to be told from our rice rat. But the most charac- 

 teristic rodent, the big long-tailed, jumping springhaas, re- 

 sembled nothing of ours; and there were tree rats and 

 spiny mice. There were gray monkeys in the trees around 

 camp, which the naturalists shot. 



Heller trapped various beasts; beautifully marked 

 genets, and a big white-tailed mongoose which was very 



