THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
so that they must have the habit of returning day after day to the same spot 
to deposit their droppings. Although I never met with dik-diks in East 
Africa actually on hills, yet along the Gwas N’yiro they were always 
plentiful round the bases of hills where the ground was usually very 
stony, as well as on all low rocky bush -covered ridges. Cavendish’s 
dik-diks, which I found plentiful in the neighbourhood of Lake Nakuru 
and Lake Elmenteita, I used only to see in the early mornings and late 
evenings when they were feeding and moving about outside the patches 
of bush within which they lay hidden during the heat of the day. But along 
the Gwas N’yiro the dik-diks were visible at all times of day. In the 
mornings and evenings they were feeding about, and in the middle of the 
day they were often to be seen standing in the shade of scrubby thorn 
bushes. The intense heat of the sun in that part of the country seemed to 
make them disinclined to move in the middle of the day, and I have ridden 
past numbers of them which stood looking at me without moving at a 
distance of less than fifty yards — sometimes, indeed, within twenty yards. 
In the mornings and evenings they were less confiding as a rule. Dik-diks 
may be met with singly, but more often they live in pairs or three 
together — male, female and last year’s fawn. 
Although certain species of dik-diks, such as Cavendish’s dik-dik in 
British East Africa and Salt’s dik-dik in Abyssinia, are found at an altitude 
of between five and six thousand feet, they appear to be most abundant 
at lower altitudes where the climate is very hot. Along the Northern 
Gwas N’yiro River, where the heat is intense and the country very parched 
and dry, they simply swarm, and very large bags of them might be made 
by first posting several guns and then driving the bush towards them with 
native beaters. But in a country still full of rhinoceroses, giraffes and 
various species of large antelopes such small fry as dik-diks are either 
entirely disregarded or only shot in small numbers for food or specimens. 
They afford good practice with a rook rifle, but can be killed quite easily 
with a shot-gun. 
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