THE HOME OF THE RHINO 115 



liminary rushes toward us were efforts to verify the 

 location of danger in order to determine the right 

 direction for escape. In all, we made between fif- 

 teen and twenty different attempts on different 

 rhinos to get a charge, but with always practically 

 the same result, yet with always the same thrill of 

 excitement and uncertainty. 



Comprehensive statistics on a rhino's charges are 

 hard to obtain. The district commissioner at Embo 

 told me that he had been ordered to reduce the num- 

 ber of rhinos in his district in the interest of public 



The End of the Charge 



safety and that he had killed thirty-five in all. Out 

 of this number five charged him. That would indi- 

 cate that one rhino in seven will charge. Captain 

 Dickinson, in his book, Big Game Shooting on the 

 Equator, tells of a rhino that charged him so 

 viciously that he threw down his bedding roll and 

 the rhino tossed it and trampled it with great em- 

 phasis, after which it triumphantly trotted away, 

 elated probably in the thought that it had wiped 

 out its enemy. A number of fatalities are on rec- 

 ord to prove that the rhino is a dangerous beast at 

 times, and so I must conclude that the rhino experi- 



