THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
a hippo tooth which was dredged up near the junction of the Orange and 
Vaal rivers, but I have never met anyone who had himself seen living 
hippos in any part of the Orange River. However, as the lower part of this 
river is very little known, some few of these animals may possibly still 
survive there. 
In Natal a herd of hippos was long preserved in a wild state in a lagoon 
near the Umgeni River, but in 1898 it was found necessary to destroy 
these animals on account of their devastations in the neighbouring sugar 
plantations. In some parts of South-Western Africa the gradual desicca- 
tion of the country has been responsible for the disappearance of hippos 
from their former haunts. Less than a hundred years ago they were met 
with by the Rev. Robert Moffat in the Kuruman River in Southern Bechu- 
analand, and many years later they were still found in the pools of the 
Molopo, near the present town of Mafeking; but it is a very long time now 
since there was water enough for an otter, let alone a hippopotamus, in 
either of those streams. Still, though the range of the hippopotamus has 
been very considerably curtailed in the settled districts of South and 
South-Western Africa, it has been but very little affected by the progress 
of civilization in other parts of the continent. Although steamers now ply 
regularly on all the great lakes and rivers of Africa, hippos have nowhere 
deserted their immemorial haunts through the terror inspired by these 
smoking, panting, screeching monsters. Utter astonishment at first held 
them spellbound, watching at close range these curious -looking, swift - 
moving structures; but they soon discovered that they were products of 
the ingenuity of their one and only enemy, man, for many of them were 
wounded or killed by rifle shots fired from their decks. They soon learnt 
wisdom, and now usually give steamers a pretty wide berth, but at the 
same time they have grown quite used to them, and altogether refuse to 
retire from the larger waterways because these have been invaded by the 
noisy restlessness of modern civilization. 
Shooting hippos may be mere butchery, or it may be an exceedingly 
difficult and sometimes even dangerous form of sport. 
I have seen herds of hippos in comparatively small pools in the rivers 
running to the Zambesi, from the high lands of the country now known as 
Southern Rhodesia, in which it would have been easy for a fairly good shot 
to have killed every one of these animals in a very short time. On the other 
hand, to shoot hippos from a small boat or a crank canoe in a large river 
like the Zambesi is most difficult. The boat is unsteady, and the hippos, 
24 
