ANTELOPES 123 



be at last betrayed by some errant breath of air, and hear 

 the unseen quarry dash away through the bamboos and 

 under growth. 



The Wanderobo hunters, who share the Mau and 

 Kikuyu forests in East Africa with the bongo, kill a 

 certain number of them, sometimes by catching them in 

 pits and snares, and sometimes by shooting them with 

 poisoned arrows. 



Bongos are found sometimes singly, and sometimes in 

 family parties of three or four, or possibly more. The 

 Wanderobo say that they usually feed up to about 

 9 A.M., and then lie down during the hottest part of the 

 day. In the writer's own very limited experience, how- 

 ever, they were moving about throughout the day, and 

 animals were several times approached, which, by their 

 tracks, had been standing in deep soil among a lot of 

 thick bamboos. They affect thick bamboo forest or 

 jungly undergrowth, which is often much higher than 

 a man's head, and use well-defined paths through the 

 covert, drinking, apparently, regularly every night. Food 

 seems to consist principally of the leaves and twigs of a 

 certain kind of undergrowth which grows from six to 

 eight feet in height, and the young shoots are all nipped 

 off where bongo have been feeding. There is not much 

 grass in the forest. A large charred stump had all the 

 bark eaten off between three and five feet from the 

 ground, and the dead wood scraped away. The natives 

 say the bongo eats wood, and the stump certainly bore 

 every appearance of having been gnawed by teeth. 

 Bongo have all the cunning and wariness of the common 

 bushbuck, and, for such large animals, can move through 

 thick jungle with comparatively little noise. 

 THE BUSHBUCK. This is the typical species of a 

 genus of forest dwellers, which is distinguished by the 



