SEFARI LIFE 155 



mother's hut by the lake, one hundred and fifty miles away. 

 Most porters would have immediately spent a large sum 

 (for them) in buying a ticket on the next train, and so impress- 

 ing their relatives with their importance. 



Before closing this chapter, which is nothing if not 

 practical, I will add some hints about food which every 

 traveller knows to be an important subject, and in Africa, 

 is doubly important, since good food is not always easily 

 obtained, while the trying climate renders it peculiarly 

 necessary. 



I was prepared to put up with poor meat. I was told 

 "African meat is dry and tasteless, and has small nourish- 

 ment in it." I must admit that much game meat is very 

 poor stuff; that no meat compares for a moment with the flesh 

 of our own wild animals, fed on the short bunch grass of 

 the prairie, or mountain. You never see a bit of rich, 

 brown fat on anything, or indeed, any fat at all, except on a 

 hippo or a lion, which, well, smells! or a cow eland (which 

 you cannot shoot now, though you could a few years ago). 

 But though all game meat here is unaccountably thin, one 

 of the chief reasons it eats so badly is that everyone in the 

 country seems possessed with the idea that it cannot be kept 

 but must be cooked at once, or at most in twenty-four hours. 



When I first began to spend my holidays after big game 

 in our Eastern woods or Western mountains, I encoun- 

 tered precisely the same prejudice and it was not till 

 I made my men use gunny sacks for the meat I wanted for 

 myself, and saw it hung in the shade, safe in its rough cov- 

 ering from flies, but open to the air, that I succeeded in 

 convincing my experienced companions that meat could be 

 kept, when properly butchered, often as long as ten days, 

 and yet remain sound and sweet. So kept and hung, there 

 is no meat game in the world that can compare with our 

 blacktail, wapiti, or mountain sheep. Now, though no 

 cleanliness in preparing, or carefulness in hanging African 



