THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
maximum length they ever attain, whilst specimens have been obtained 
at Lake Bengweolo with horns measuring up to thirty-five inches. As in all 
the kobs and waterbucks, the females are hornless. In both sexes the 
colour of the upper parts of the body is rich red brown, but the face and 
lower part of the neck and sides are much lighter. The backs of the ears 
in adult animals are of a uniform fawn colour, but in young animals the 
ears are tipped with black as in the adult puku. The belly is white and the 
front of both fore and hind legs black. 
When I first visited the flooded grass plains in the neighbourhood of 
Linyanti, on the Chobi River, now nearly forty years ago, great herds of 
lechwi antelopes were to be seen in every direction. Amongst these large 
herds there were always many males of all ages from the year-old bucks 
to the full-grown animals, whose long lyre-shaped horns made them very 
conspicuous in the open ground they frequented. I once counted fifty -two 
male lechwis together, but they comprised bucks of all ages. When much 
hunted, lechwi antelopes soon grow wary, and are difficult to approach, 
but in the countries where I first met with them they would usually allow 
me to walk up to within a hundred and fifty yards of them in the open, and 
often much nearer before running off. When they make up their minds to 
run, lechwi antelopes invariably first stretch out their noses, and then trot 
leisurely away, the old males laying their horns back along each side of 
their necks. They soon, however, break into a gallop, often bounding high 
in the air, like impala antelopes. As they are nearly always in shallow 
water, a herd of lechwis in full flight causes a great deal of splashing, 
as even when the water becomes so deep that their bodies are nearly 
submerged, they keep on plunging forward in a succession of bounds 
from the bottom. In deep water they can swim at a great pace, though not 
so fast as the natives can pole and paddle in their canoes. 
I may here remark that my friend Captain C. H. Stigand has informed 
me that Mrs Gray’s kob has exactly the same habit of first stretching out 
its nose and laying its horns back on each side of its neck when first 
starting to run as the lechwi, and this habit, combined with its whole 
mode of life, the shape of the horns in the males, and the structural 
peculiarities of the feet due to the aquatic life led by both species, fully 
justify that very observant naturalist, Mr Theodore Roosevelt, in speaking 
of Mrs Gray’s kob as Mrs Gray’s lechwi, and claiming for it a very close 
relationship with the true lechwi. 
Immense numbers of lechwi antelopes used to be killed annually in the 
132 
