i64 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



whisper, ''Pig," and at the moment I heard a grunt, and knew a wild boar and his 

 family were facing me. After what seemed a long wait, the two lesser silhouettes 

 slowly retraced their steps, sniffing as they went. The old tusker champed and pawed 

 and covered their retreat. 



It was five o'clock when I was left alone at the lake edge, hidden in my turf retreat, 

 with the green tent cloth laid over me. Almost at once the first junglefowl crowed. 

 Then spoonbills and pelicans arrived separately ; curlews ; more spoonbills, and a host 

 of flamingos flying so high that they caught the sun's rays long before the acacia scrub 

 was alight. Two elephants moved slowly away from the lake and swung into the 

 jungle, and to my left five axis deer came out and fought the flies on a gentle rise of 

 ground. In my cool ambush I seemed to be in some unfenced zoological garden, so 

 abundant and unsuspicious were the wild creatures. 



Then a familiar, long-drawn-out scream reached me, and I twisted quickly enough 

 to see a great bird with undulating feathery train glide down from a distant high tree 

 and disappear a hundred yards away behind a ridge. 



Discarding my helmet, with my luger slipped around between my shoulder-blades, 

 my glasses buttoned into my shirt and my leather elbow-pads in position, I began to 

 " caterpillar " along on my back trail. When, at one time or another, one has travelled 

 long distances in this way, one learns instinctively to control his anatomy so that 

 neither body nor limbs rise above a twelve-inch level. Here, with grass all about, this 

 vermiform mode of progression concealed me completely except from creatures flying 

 overhead. I had just come to realize in the last few weeks that the term vermiform was 

 not the best to use. My progress was certainly along the ground, it was undeniably on 

 my belly in the dust, but my stubs of forelimbs, represented by my elbows, by means 

 of which I rowed myself along, were, zoologically, not exactly worm-like. They were 

 more salamandrine. This I thought until I saw the little mud-skippers, those small 

 pop-eyed fish known as gobies, which leave their element and on bent pectoral fins 

 hitch themselves over the slithery mud. Then, and not until then, did I realize that, 

 from a locomotory point of view, I had reverted to the gobies ; my ambulatory atavism 

 was in the direction of a mud-skipper. But an ornithologist in the field knows no 

 dignity, no precedent. When a level piece of ground is to be crossed, and crossed 

 without being observed, one's only concern should be for a path free from sharp-pointed 

 stones, thorns and fire-ants. Then it is a stalk de luxe. And if the path is not so free, 

 why, it is still to be traversed. And if the approach is made well, with the patience of 

 a creeping feline, the reward is sure to be over-generous, out of all proportion to the 

 bodily discomfort. 



From observation on a former trip I knew that beyond the first bit of rolling 

 ground was a depression with a stagnant slough in the centre. I writhed and levered 

 my way up the sandy slope, and then worked through a dense grass clump, peered out 

 and saw nothing — at least my first glance showed no life except one of the omnipresent 

 pairs of bee-eaters. Then a dead, angular, wooden stub, protruding from the grass, 

 swayed, and I knew it for the head and neck of a Peacock, a real wild bird of Pan, the 

 first I had ever seen outside of civilized surroundings. The bird was standing drawn 

 up to its greatest height, and its attention was centred, not on me, but on the ground 

 close to its feet. Its neck was so stretched out that it appeared attenuated to the 



