292 
FOREST AND STREAM 
July, 1921 
Hunting Dog is really a dangerous ani- 
mal to man. They will pull down any 
kind of game and appear quite fearless; 
often when I have met them, or shot one 
of a pack, they have approached fairly 
close and kept me under observation for 
some time. They have given me the im- 
pression that they were quite ready to 
come for me, and numWers of old hunt- 
ers have told me of similar experiences ; 
“for two pins,” they say, “the dogs 
would have come for me,” or, “if I had 
not shot the leader the whole pack would 
have been on me.” The fact 
remains, however, that in twen- 
ty years experience of Africa 
and African hunters I have 
never heard an authenticated in- 
stance of a man having been 
killed, or wounded, by these ani- 
mals. 
O F other game, there is only 
one deer in Africa, the 
Barbary deer, which is probably 
not African but has come from 
Europe. The game animals in 
which Africa excels are the 
hollow - horned ruminants; of 
these there are a great wealth 
and variety. These are grass 
and leaf eating animals of 
which the males at least, and 
generally both sexes, bear un- 
branched horns which are not 
shed annually, as with the deer, 
but continue to grow during the 
whole life of the beast. These 
horns are of the most varied 
shapes but all have hollow cores 
which fit onto corresponding 
growths of bone springing from 
the top of the head. 
In this group are found, — cat- 
tle, such as the Buffaloes and 
the Wilde beasts, or gnus; large 
antelopes, such as the Elands, 
Sable, Roan and the different 
kinds of oryx; spiral horned an- 
telopes of which the Kudu is the 
finest trophy and others are the 
Bongo, Situtunga, lesser Kuda, 
Nyala and bushbuck; the large 
group of the Hartebeests, with 
horns turned at right angles and 
the bastard Hartebeests, includ- 
ing the Sassaby and Thiang, 
with curving horns but the same 
ungainly bodies as the true ' 
Hartebeests. 
Then there is a big division 
with horns more or less, lyre-shaped but 
with the tips pointing forwards, all of 
which, nearly, are water-loving animals. 
Such are: the long-haired waterbucks; 
the Lechwes, of which Mrs. Gray’s 
Lechwe is the most handsome; the Kobs, 
the Puku and the Reedbucks, of which 
there are several varieties. 
Another very large division includes 
the Gazelles, thin-legged 1 , wiry animals 
adapted to live in dry countries — of 
these the Grant’s gazelle bears the finest 
horns and the most curious is the long- 
necked Waller’s gazelle. 
There are the sheep, including the 
Ibex and the Barbary sheep, and num- 
berless other hollow horned ruminants 
from the Addax. ImDala and Blesbok 
2. The Desert. 
"3. The Bush. 
4. The Forest. 
5. Swamps. 
6. Mountains. 
Each of these divisions requires dif- 
ferent methods of hunting, and is, gen- 
erally speaking, the habitat of different 
game, although that typical of the vari- 
ous regions often overlaps. As examples 
of such overlapping one might instance 
the hartebeest, a typical game of the 
plains but which is also found 
in bushes but not in thick bush ; 
the lion, which inhabits both 
bush and plain; the bushbuck, 
which is typical of the bush but 
may be found on the edge of 
forest. So the grouping of 
game, as inhabitants of the 
above types of country, can only 
be considered as generally cor- 
rect, just as the division of the 
continent into types is a purely 
arbitrary arrangement, for all 
sorts of country, intermediate 
between the extremes, is en- 
countered. 
The Plains- 
T HE rolling, treeless prairies 
of short grass are the hab- 
itat of hartebeests, zebras, 
wildebeests, oribis, steinbok, 
warthog and cheetah. Lion 
hunt the plains by night but 
generally return to bush, or 
scrub, to lie up during the day, 
or else take cover in a reed bed, 
or a treed riverbed. Many other 
kinds of game are found inci- 
dentally on the plains but most 
of them are mere visitors from 
bush, or desert, rather than real 
denizens of the prairies. The 
true plain dweller relies little 
on scent for locating an enemy; 
it depends chiefly on seeing its 
adversary as a moving object at 
a distance and avoiding it by 
its fleetness. It is interesting to 
follow along the edge of bush 
abutting on prairie and watch 
the different behavior of the ani- 
mals one disturbs. 
First, perhaps, one encounters 
a herd of zebra, or hartebeest, 
grazing near the edge of the 
bush. On sighting their enemy, 
man, they turn and fly into the 
open plain— to them, danger lies be- 
hind every bush, and safety means an 
oren field of view on all sides. Next 
one sees a Wushbuck, which has vent- 
ured out to graze a few yards from 
cover ; it cocks up its head and then 
plunges into the bush and continues 
pushing its way through the vegetation 
until it has reached the center of a 
thick and tangled clump of under- 
growth. 
The plain-dwellers are mostly grega- 
rious, some of the herd scan the hori- 
zon whilst the rest graze. The wilde- 
beest often go so far as to post sentries 
at a few hundred yards from the main 
body — a solitary gnu standing conspicu- 
The Sable Antelope 
and a quantity of other monkeys; Ba- 
boons; the Galago Lemur; several cats; 
Gennets; the African porcupine; the 
Ratel, or Honey Badger; Jackals; the 
Scaly Manis (the armadillo of the old 
world) ; and the curious ant bear (the 
ant-eater of Africa) whose tracks and 
burrowings are ubiquitous, although it- 
self never met with. 
T HE types of country found in Africa 
may We divided up, for the pur- 
poses of big game hunting, into the 
following: 
1. The Plains. 
*Gorillas do not occur in the Congo water 
shed, but only north of it in the Ogowe Rivet 
district. — [Edmund Heller.] 
down to the small fry such as Oribis, 
Steinboks, Duikers and Dik Diks. Of 
other sorts of game there are Giraffes 
and Zebras of several kinds; the Okapi; 
Pigs, from the giant hog to the ugly 
warthog; Hyaena of three species, and 
the Crocodile and the Ostrich. 
Apart from the game there are nu- 
merous other animals, many of them pe- 
culiar to Africa, of interest to the natu- 
ralist-hunter. Such are: the Gorilla of 
the Kameroons*; the Chimpanzee of the 
equatorial forests; the Colobus, Hussar 
