44 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 6l 



rhino look like the hook of a turtle's beak. The stomachs contained 

 nothing but grass. It is a grazing, not a browsing animal.. 



" There were some white egrets — not, as is usually the case with 

 both rhinos and elephants, the cow heron, but the slender, black- 

 legged, yellow-toed egret — on the rhinos, and the bodies and heads of 

 both the cow and calf looked as though they had been splashed with 

 streaks of whitewash. One of the egrets returned after the shooting 

 and perched on the dead body of the calf. 



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" It was Kermit's turn for the next rhino ; and by good luck it was 

 a bull, giving us a complete group of bull, cow, and calf for the 

 National Museum. We got it as we had gotten our first two. March- 

 ing through like country — burnt, this time — we came across the 

 tracks of three rhino, two big and one small, and followed them 

 through the black ashes. It was an intricate and difficult piece of 

 tracking, for the trail wound hither and thither and was criss-crossed 

 by others ; but Kongoni and Kassitura gradually untangled the maze, 

 found where the beasts had drunk at a small pool .that morning, and 

 then led us to where they were lying asleep under some thorn-trees. 

 It was about eleven o'clock. As the bull rose Kermit gave him a fatal 

 shot with his beloved Winchester. He galloped full speed toward us, 

 not charging, but in a mad panic of terror and bewilderment ; and with 

 a bullet from the Holland I brought him down in his tracks only a few 

 yards away. The cow went of! at a gallop. The calf, a big creature, 

 half grown, hung about for some time, and came up quite close, but 

 was finally frightened away by shouting and hand-clapping. Some 

 cow-herons were round these rhino ; and the head and body of the bull 

 looked as if it had been splashed with whitewash. 



" It was an old bull, with a short, stubby, worn-down horn. It was 

 probably no heavier than a big, ordinary rhino bull such as we had 

 shot on the Sotik, and its horns were no larger, and the front and rear 

 ones were of the same proportions relatively to each other. But the 

 misshapen head was much larger, and the height seemed greater 

 because of the curious hump. This fleshy hump is not over the high 

 dorsal vertebrae, but just forward of them, on the neck itself, and has 

 no connection with the spinal column. The square-mouthed rhinoce- 

 ros of South Africa is always described as being very much bigger 

 than the common prehensile-lipped African rhinoceros, and as carry- 

 ing much longer horns. But the square-mouthed rhinos we saw and 

 killed in the Lado did not differ from the common kind in size and 

 horn development as much as we had been led to expect ; although on 



