TWO DIANAS IN SOMALILAND 243 



guda tree, hunting first to see no snake shared my seat 

 with me. I kept utterly silent for an hour or more, 

 when my patience was rewarded. Through the 

 bushes I saw a white chin bobbing up and down as it 

 chose out the most succulent thorns. Lower it went. 

 I hardly breathed. To see a lesser koodoo in his 

 haunts one sometimes has to wait for months. Here 

 was I, in the limits of a morning's patrol, so lucky. 

 The great broad ear flickered in and out. Because 

 this antelope mostly lives in thick cover where quick 

 hearing is his only safety, his ear has grown in ac- 

 cordance with necessities. Somali hunters never 

 seem to differentiate between the koodoo and the 

 lesser koodoo. They are both one and the same to 

 them, and are called " Godir " indiscriminately. 

 And yet the two animals are so different it seems 

 absurd to think of confusion. 



The koodoo (strepsiceros koodoo) is the biggest 

 antelope in Somaliland, heavy, magnificent and war- 

 like. It inhabits mountainous parts, and the reason 

 would seem to be plain. Space for such great horns 

 is required, and though on occasion they frequent 

 jungly parts of the Golis, their nature and habit is to 

 live in the stony gorges, and stalking one is not unlike 

 stalking one of our own Scotch deer. The lesser 

 koodoo (strepsiceros imberbis) is the personification 

 of all the graces. What the koodoo gains in majesty 

 the lesser has in exquisite symmetry of line and 

 contour. The lesser koodoo never grows much larger 

 than a small donkey, the horns are replicas in little 

 of the average three footer of the koodoo, and there is 



