A HUNTER'S CAMP-FIRES 



loud-mouthed and lazy, had provoked our dislike by continually 

 insisting that the other Swahilis should eat nothing but strictly 

 Mohammedan-killed meat. 



This was an excellent chance for me to make some pointed 

 remarks, half in Swahili, half in English, on the code of true 

 believers, evoking laughs from the other porters and goading 

 the old fellow to action. While one man attracted the atten- 

 tion of the antelope, another slipped up from behind and grasped 

 it by the tail, at which Omari, armed with a knife, leaped for 

 its shoulders. With incredible activity the wounded oryx 

 threw the man grasping its tail to the ground, and met the 

 oncoming Swahili with a savage upward sweep of its long, 

 straight horns. One horn missed Omari entirely, but the other 

 passed between his body and belt, and threw oryx and Swahili 

 to the ground in a struggling heap. Fortunately the rotten 

 leather of the belt parted under the strain, and the frightened 

 porter did not stop travelling on his hands and knees until he 

 had gone fully fifty feet. After this almost fatal incident I 

 finished the animal with a shot in the shoulders. This bull 

 did not have quite as long a set of horns as the others, the 

 measurements being twenty-eight and twenty-nine inches in 

 length. 



Shortly after daylight the next morning, while sweeping the 

 surrounding country with the field-glasses from the summit 

 of the kopje, I discovered a long stream of dark-colored animals 

 winding across the plain between the pinnacle and the bush. 

 One hundred and fifty miles farther south I would have said 

 that these were brindled wildebeests, but a careful scrutiny 

 with the glasses revealed it to be a migrating herd of about 

 eighty of the long-sought African buffalo. Formerly these 

 beasts had been very plentiful throughout British East Africa, 

 but a number of years previous the rinderpest had swept 

 through the land, wiping out most of the buffalo as well as the 

 native cattle. A few isolated herds of buffalo had escaped this 



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