THE CREATURE GOD FORGOT 165 



Whenever in our travels we come upon a giraffe 

 that has been killed by lions oiu: natives make a rush 

 for the carcass in hopes that the jackals and vulttires 

 have left the precious tail intact. I must add that 

 such a find is not as valuable as we used to think. 

 Our guide Boculy later confided to me that the hairs 

 from a dead animal have lost much of their effective- 

 ness in keeping away the devil. 



A settler was once talking to me about his super- 

 stition and laughing over the native's insistence that 

 the hairs from the tail of a live giraffe make good 

 medicine. He related the following incident: 



"I remember seeing twenty giraffe bogged in a 

 mud swamp. We weren't after the poor devils. 

 Somehow they got ahead of us and seemed to think 

 we were chasing them. Before we knew it they had 

 galloped straight into a morass that we knew was 

 badly mired after recent rains. I should have 

 thought the animals' instinct would have kept them 

 out. But I suppose they were so frightened they 

 lost their heads. 



''We went up and tried to do something to help 

 them. But our presence' only made them struggle 

 deeper and deeper. We went away hoping that 

 when we got out of sight they would manage to 

 escape from the clinging mud that dripped their 

 slender legs. Otherwise the group would either die 

 of starvation or of fright. 



