JUJA FARM; HIPPO AND LEOPARD 119 
We thought it was dead^ but would take no chances; and I 
put in another, but as it proved needless, heavy bullet. 
It was an old female, considerably smaller than the bull 
I had already shot, with the front horn measuring four¬ 
teen inches as against his nineteen inches; as always with 
rhinos, it was covered with ticks, which clustered thickly 
in the folds and creases of the skin, around and in the ears, 
and in all the tender places. McMillan sent out an ox 
wagon and brought it in to the house, where we weighed it. 
It was a little over two thousand two hundred pounds. 
It had evidently been in the neighborhood in which we 
found it for a considerable time, for a few hundred yards 
away we found its stamping ground, a circular spot where 
the earth had been all trampled up and kicked about, ac¬ 
cording to the custom of rhinoceroses; they return day 
after day to such places to deposit their dung, which is then 
kicked about with the hind feet. As with all our other 
specimens, the skin was taken off and sent back to the 
National Museum. The stomach was filled with leaves 
and twigs, this kind of rhinoceros browsing on the tips of 
the branches by means of its hooked, prehensile upper lip. 
Now I did not want to kill this rhinoceros, and I am 
not certain that it really intended to charge us. It may 
very well be that if we had stood firm it would, after much 
threatening and snorting, have turned and made off; vet¬ 
eran hunters like Selous could, I doubt not, have afforded 
to wait and see what happened. But I let it get within forty 
yards, and it still showed every symptom of meaning mis¬ 
chief, and at a shorter range I could not have been sure of 
stopping it in time. Often under such circumstances the 
rhino does not mean to charge at all, and is acting in a 
