134 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
this country, a coat of black hair which becomes thin in the 
old bulls, and massive horns which rise into great bosses at 
the base, these bosses sometimes meeting in old age so as 
to cover the forehead with a frontlet of horn. Their habits 
vary much in different places. Where they are much 
persecuted, they lie in the densest cover, and only venture 
out into the open to feed at night. But Heatley, though 
he himself had killed a couple of bulls, and the Boer farmer 
who was working for him another, had preserved the herd 
from outside molestation, and their habits were doubtless 
much what they would have been in regions where man is 
a rare visitor. 
The first day we were on Heatley’s farm, we saw the 
buffalo, to the number of seventy or eighty, grazing in the 
open, some hundreds of yards from the papyrus swamp, 
and this shortly after noon. For a mile from the papyrus 
swamp the country was an absolutely flat plain, gradually 
rising into a gentle slope, and it was an impossibility to ! 
approach the buffalo across this plain save in one way to 
be mentioned hereafter. Probably when the moon was 
full the buffalo came out to graze by night. But while we 
were on our hunt the moon was young, and the buffalo 
evidently spent most of the night in the papyrus, and came 
out to graze by day. Sometimes they came out in the early | 
morning, sometimes in the late evening, but quite as often 
in the bright daylight. We saw herds come out to graze at 
ten o’clock in the morning, and again at three in the after¬ 
noon. They usually remained out several hours, first | 
grazing and then lying down. Flocks of the small white 
cow-heron usually accompanied them, the birds stalking i 
about among them or perching on their backs; and occa- j 
