194- 
IN AFRICA 
always does sentinel duty for the others. His eyes 
are so keen that he sees your hat when you appear 
over the horizon two miles away, and from that mo¬ 
ment he never loses sight of you. If you approach 
too near he whistles shrilly, and every other animal 
within several hundred yards is on the alert and 
apprehensive. The kongoni often risks his own life 
to warn other herds of animals of the approach of 
danger, and if I were going to write an animal 
story I’d use the kongoni as my hero. The hunters 
hate him for the trouble he gives them, but a fair- 
minded man can not help but recognize the heroic, 
self-sacrificing qualities of the big, awkward, vigi¬ 
lant antelope. Why these two sentinels had not 
seen us is still and always will be a mystery, but it 
is certain that they had not. 
At the same time we knew that any attempt to 
approach nearer would alarm them and they in turn 
would sound the shrill tocsin of warning to the un¬ 
suspecting elephant herd, in which event we might 
have to track the elephants for miles until they set¬ 
tled down again. So we cautiously climbed down, 
retreated below the edge of the hill, and worked our 
way up in the lee of the group farthest to our left 
in the expectation of finding the three bulls. From 
tree to tree, and in the protection of large ant-hills, 
we moved forward until we were less than fifty 
yards from the elephants. Then we studied them 
again, but could not locate the bulls. 
Probably at this time something may have oc¬ 
curred to make the elephants nervous. Perhaps the 
