THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
which they were feeding, the hunted animals got the wind of their pursuers 
before it was possible to see them. They, of course, at once took to flight, 
and often got a fairly long start. When the Bushmen came to the spot 
where the giraffes had taken the alarm, they did not hesitate an instant, 
but, just calling out in Sechwana (as their own language was incompre- 
hensible to a white man), “Sabeelee!” (“They’ve run!’’), dashed off 
along the now open trail at their utmost speed. How they ran, those spare, 
half-starved sons of the desert ! One had to put one’s horse to a good 
canter to keep near them. Sooner or later the giraffes were sighted, for, 
not having been thoroughly alarmed, they would not run at any great 
pace, and would often stop to look behind them. “Tutla kio!” (“There 
are the giraffes ! ”), at last the foremost Bushman would cry, halting and 
pointing eagerly forwards; and if the white man performed his share of 
the day’s work, it would not be long before the delighted and hungry 
savages were chattering and dancing round the prostrate form of a fallen 
giant. Giraffe -hunting is, however, now a thing of the past, as throughout 
their range they are everywhere specially protected. In the Sudan one may 
be shot for a payment of £20, in addition to the £50 which must be paid for 
a shooting licence. In East Africa the extra fee for a giraffe is £10, and in 
South Africa, where the animal is now royal game, I don’t think one can 
be shot at all except under a special licence from the High Commissioner. 
The single isolated herd of giraffes which exists in the valley of the Luang wa 
river, in North-East Rhodesia, is also, very rightly, carefully protected. 
Even in Gordon Cumming’s time, giraffes were seldom met with in 
South Africa in herds exceeding twenty individuals; and in my own 
experience, some thirty years later, and a few hundred miles further north, 
I never saw a large number of these animals together, but there would be 
many small herds of from three or four to twelve or fifteen individuals in 
quite a small area of country. On the Gwas N’gishu plateau, in British 
East Africa, there are certainly not as many giraffes as there used to 
be some forty years ago in parts of what is now the Bechuanaland 
Protectorate; but in the first -named district, four years ago (in 1910), I 
counted thirty-two of these animals in one herd, and I heard that in other 
parts of the country as many as forty or fifty were often seen together. 
I found the Somali giraffe ( Giraffa Camelopardalis reticulata ) very numerous 
on both sides of the northern Gwas N’yiro river, below Archer’s 
Post. One day, on climbing to the top of a high rocky hill, a few miles 
from the north bank of the river, I counted thirty -three of these 
44 
