39 : 



Great and Small Game of Africa 



granti, with which it associates perhaps for the sake of safety as well as 

 companionship. I have also seen them entirely by themselves. They 

 affect open bush and sparsely-timbered country more than the plains, and 

 are found in the dryest and most arid places at very long distances from 

 water. When found in open bush and disturbed, they take to the open 

 for safety, but when wounded, like most other game, they make lor the 

 bush. In the Arusha wa Chini country, south of Kilimanjaro, I once 

 wounded a single bull oryx upon the plain at the foot of the Sogonoi hills, 

 into which it retreated — a course I should imagine very unusual for so 

 essentially a beast of the open — and in spite of following it for three 

 hours up and down the rough stony hillsides, I had eventually to give it 

 up, being then dead beat and unable to go farther. They are grass 

 feeders and thrive well, being fat and sleek during the hottest and driest 

 time of the year, when there is not a vestige of anything green. It is a 

 curious fact that in the country most frequented by the oryx, both at Kili- 

 manjaro and near Lake Baringo (where the O. beisa is found), there grows a 

 curious low creeping plant which throws out in all directions tendrils about 

 1 8 inches long, covered with a very hard, sharp, thorny berry, which 

 always has a spike sticking upwards. An oryx is at all times fairly difficult 

 to stalk, but these spiky berries render it much more tedious, not to say 

 painful, when on hands and knees, or crawling on one's stomach, as even 

 leather, which will turn most thorns, affords little protection. 



I can give no dimensions, but am inclined to think, after a lapse of ten 

 years since I saw the O. calloth, that it is a somewhat smaller beast than 

 the O. beisa. The heads are certainly inferior in length of horn. In colour 

 they are like the common gray donkey, and at a distance look very like the 

 "punda," with which every one in East Africa is familiar. One of the 

 most striking things about a bull oryx is the extraordinary thickness of 

 the skin of the neck and front of the shoulders, no doubt a provision of 

 nature to protect them during the fights that take place during the rutting 



