THE SITUTUNGAS 
told me that when they saw a canoe approaching it was their usual habit 
to sink down in the water until their bodies, heads and horns were entirely 
submerged, only their nostrils just appearing above the surface. Such 
animals as saw or heard a canoe approaching before they had themselves 
been seen would in all probability be passed unnoticed; but when the 
natives saw them before they had crouched down in the water, they had 
only to paddle up to them and spear them from the canoe. From the fact 
that nearly every native I met with on the Chobi was wearing a situtunga 
skin, and that all the animals from which these skins had been taken had 
certainly been speared and not shot, the account given me of their habits 
when approached in deeply flooded swamps is, I am inclined to think, 
true; but, on the other hand, a female situtunga which I once came upon, 
which was standing in water which came above her belly, dashed off in a 
series of leaps the instant she saw me. The chief of a small village near the 
junction of the Chobi and Zambesi Rivers once told me that he and his 
people had, during a heavy flood, the preceding year speared fifteen 
situtungas in one day in a neighbouring reed bed. 
