THE REGION SOUTH OF TEE ZAMBESI. 
259 
of my companions brought me within firing distance 
of buffaloes, and each time traces of blood were left 
behind. It was often as long as three-quarters of an 
hour before the Bushmen returned from following the 
spoor ; but each time all they had to say was “ Aykona 
chaya ”—You have missed, or the game is gone ! Now 
the distance had been in each case so short, that I 
could not have missed, and it was just possible that the 
men deceived me, to avoid having to carry the heavy 
horns to the camp for me. 
It was about an hour before sunset when the Bush¬ 
men cried : “ Hamba umlilo ”—Let us go to the fire, 
that is to say, to the camp; and I agreed. They 
pointed out to me wdiere it lay, and I subsequently 
found it was an hour’s distance from us; but I should 
never have found my way alone through the winding 
paths of the wilderness, in which, however, my black 
guides were quite at home. We had been picking our 
way along for about a quarter of an hour in the 
cautious, suspicious manner which becomes habitual 
to the hunter or traveller in this country, when we 
reached a spot where some large animal had evidently 
been quite recently rolling in the sand, and from the 
footprints we at once recognised it to have been the 
dreaded Pedjami, or small black rhinoceros. We 
hurried on with hushed footsteps, and presently saw 
it trotting away at about one hundred paces from us. 
The natives, who were again armed with my reserve 
guns, wanted to run after it and send a few bullets 
into it, and I had great difficulty in keeping them 
back. But the rhinoceros, hearing a noise, instead 
of the pursued became the pursuer, and, snorting 
like a steam-engine, he made for the bush behind 
which we had taken shelter, as affording us some little 
protection. 
The black rhinoceros is a singularly nervous animal. 
If it sees danger or an enemy, such as a man, before 
getting scent of it, he generally rushes snorting away ; 
but if he gets scent of anything unusual, and his sense 
of smell is of extraordinary keenness, he suddenly 
s 2 
