448 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



guidance of some native who had come in to tell us where 

 he had seen game that morning. The jungle was so thick 

 in places and the grass was everywhere so long, that with- 

 out such guidance there was little successful hunting to be 

 done in only two or three hours. We might come back 

 with a buck, or with two or three guinea-fowl, or with 

 nothing. 



There were a good many poisonous snakes; I killed a 

 big puff adder with thirteen eggs inside it; and we also 

 killed a squat, short-tailed viper, beautifully mottled, not 

 eighteen inches long, but with a wide, flat head and a girth 

 of body out of all proportion to its length; and another 

 very poisonous and vicious snake, apparently of colubrine 

 type, long and slender. The birds were an unceasing 

 pleasure. White wagtails and yellow wagtails walked 

 familiarly about us within a few feet, wherever we halted 

 and when we were in camp. Long-tailed, crested colys, 

 with all four of their red toes pointed forward, clung to the 

 sides of the big fruits at which they picked. White-headed 

 swallows caught flies and gnats by our heads. There were 

 large plantain-eaters; and birds like small jays with yel- 

 low wattles round the eyes. There were boat-tailed birds, 

 in color iridescent green and purple, which looked like our 

 grakles, but were kin to the bulbuls; and another bird, 

 related to the shrikes, with bristly feathers on the rump, 

 which was colored like a red-winged blackbird, black with 

 red shoulders. Vultures were not plentiful, but the yellow- 

 billed kites, true camp scavengers, were common and tame, 

 screaming as they circled overhead, and catching bits of 

 meat which were thrown in the air for them. The shrews 

 and mice which the naturalists trapped around each camp- 

 ing place were kin to the species we had already obtained 

 in East Africa, but in most cases there was a fairly well- 

 marked difference; the jerbilles for instance had shorter 

 tails, more like ordinary rats. Frogs with queer voices 

 abounded in the marshes. Among the ants was one ar- 

 boreal kind which made huge nests, shaped like beehives 



