WITH FLASH-LIGHT AND RIFLE 



awares and at close range. I always felt considerably 

 relieved when the animal proved to be a reedbuck. It 

 is, however, exceedingly difficult to shoot it with the 

 rifle in the high grass or in the reed thickets. In the 

 valley of the Pangani I once spent a whole day stalking 

 a fine male reedbuck. But I was bent on securing it, as 

 I wanted to complete my reedbuck collection for the 

 Berlin museum. Therefore, I did not mind wading 

 about in the almost bottomless reed swamps of the 

 river, where I could hardly distinguish anything a few 

 feet away from me, sweltering in the heat and almost 

 stifled by the moist exhalations of the swampy ground. 



I found the females great with young in our month of 

 August and the males extraordinarily sly and cautious. 



The reedbuck is most successfully stalked in the early 

 hours of the morning or evening. The animals, how- 

 ever, warn one another by a peculiar whistling crv; they 

 are also protected by the swamp birds, which rise at the 

 approach of the hunter and alarm the reedbucks. 



One would think that the reedbucks of the reed- 

 grown river valleys and swamps would hold their own 

 even against the advance of man more successfully 

 than the animals of the open steppe, but this, I am 

 sorry to say, is not the case. In Rowland Ward's book, 

 Great and Small Game of Africa, we read that the reed- 

 buck, so common in the earlier days, is almost extinct in 

 Natal, Zululand and Bechuanaland, and only rarely met 

 with in the Transvaal and in Swaziland. 



316 



