296 Great and Small Game of Africa 



westwards along the Chobi, or eastwards along the Zambesi towards the 

 Victoria Falls, for though I found a few of these antelopes still surviving in 

 their old haunts in 1877, there were absolutely none either to the east or 

 the west of the small tract of country in which they had been so plentiful 

 in 1874. Both the pookoo and the lechwe were first discovered by Dr. 

 Livingstone, the latter on the Botletlie River in 1849, and the former 

 apparently on the Upper Zambesi above Libonta in November 1853. 

 When Livingstone and Oswell visited Linyanti in 1851 they crossed the 

 Chobi farther west than the range of the pookoo, but it seems curious 

 that they did not notice any of these antelopes when they visited Sesheke, 

 on the Zambesi, in 1851, as pookoo must then have been numerous in that 

 neighbourhood. In 1853 again Dr. Livingstone, whilst journeying up the 

 Zambesi from its junction with the Chobi to the falls of Gonyi, must 

 certainly have seen many herds of pookoo antelopes, but he does not seem 

 to have noticed this species (then new to science), and certainly never 

 makes any reference to it in the narrative of his travels until after passing 

 Libonta, in the Northern Barotsi country. A plate in the good doctor's 

 book Missionary Travels, entitled " New African Antelopes discovered 

 by Oswell, Murray, and Livingstone," would lead one to suppose that the 

 pookoo as well as the lechwe was first met with in the Lake Ngami 

 country ; but this can scarcely have been the case, as neither Andersson nor 

 Baldwin, who both visited the lake shortly afterwards, and who were both 

 keen naturalist-hunters, ever met with it there, and so far as I have been 

 able to discover, none of the native tribes living on or near Lake Ngami 

 are acquainted with the pookoo, nor have they any name for it in their 

 various languages. 



During a canoe journey down the Zambesi from the Barotsi valley 

 to the mouth of the Chobi in 1888, I found pookoo antelopes thinly 

 scattered along both banks of the river below the falls of Gonyi, but never 

 saw more than seven or eight in a herd. Nowhere in this part of Africa, 



