THE PIG AND HIPPOPOTAMUS 285 
By permission of Herr Carl Hagenbeck] sas (Hamburg 
BABY HIPPOPOTAMUS, AGED SIX MONTHS. 
: The Sesh of 2 young hippopotamus is said to have an excellent se Natives often follow shooting expeditions in order to secure some 
of its meat 
hippopotamus is smooth and hairless, and in adult animals quite 14 inch in thickness on the 
upper parts of the body. 
: Hippopotamuses are said to be capable of remaining under water for ten or twelve 
minutes. Should, however, a herd of these animals be watched but not fired at from the 
bank of ‘a river in which they are passing the day, they will all sink below the surface of 
the water as soon as they become ‘aware of and more or less alarmed by the presence of 
the intruder, but each member of the herd will come up to breathe at intervals of from one 
to two minutes. I have seen hippopotamuses so tame and unsuspicious of danger that they 
allowed me — the first human being probably with any kind of hat or clothes on him that 
they had ever seen — to take up a position within fifty yards of them on the edge of the deep 
rock-bound pool in which they were resting without showing any signs of alarm. They simply 
Stared at me in an inquisitive sort of way, raising their heads higher out of the water, and 
constantly twitching their little rounded ears; and it was not until a number of natives came 
‘up and began to talk ioudly that they took alarm, and, sinking out of sight, retreated to the 
farther end of the pool. I once took the length of time with my watch for more than an hour 
that a hippopotamus which I was trying to shoot remained under water. This animal, a cow 
with a new-born calf, had made an attack upon one of my canoes. It first came up under the 
canoe, tilting one end of it into the air and almost filling it with water. Then it made a 
rush at the half-swamped craft, and, laying its huge head over it, pressed it down under the 
‘water and sank it. There were four natives in the canoe at the time of the attack, all of 
whom swam safely to an island in the river—the Zambesi. After the accident — which caused 
me a good deal of loss and inconvenience —I tried to shoot this unprovoked aggressor, but 
unsuccessfully, as the river was too broad to allow me to get anything but a long shot at her. 
The shortest time she remained under water during the seventy minutes I was paying attention 
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