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AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
whydah birds of a new kind, with red on the head and 
throat, and brilliantly colored woodpeckers, and black-and- 
gold weaver-birds. Indeed, the wealth of bird life was 
such that it cannot be described. Here, too, there were 
many birds with musical voices, to which we listened in the 
early morning. The best timber was yielded by the tall 
mahogo tree, a kind of sandal-wood. This was the tree 
selected by the wild fig for its deadly embrace. The wild 
fig begins as a huge parasitic vine, and ends as one of the 
largest and most stately, and also one of the greenest and 
most shady, trees in this part of Africa. It grows up the 
mahogo as a vine and gradually, by branching, and by the 
spreading of the branches, completely envelops the trunk 
and also grows along each limb, and sends out great limbs 
of its own. Every stage can be seen, from that in which 
the big vine has begun to grow up along the still flourishing 
mahogo, through that in which the tree looks like a curious 
composite, the limbs and thick foliage of the fig branching 
out among the limbs and scanty foliage of the still living 
mahogo, to the stage in which the mahogo is simply a dead 
skeleton seen here and there through the trunk or the foliage 
of the fig. Finally nothing remains but the fig, which grows 
to be a huge tree. 
Heatley’s house was charming, with its vine-shaded 
veranda, its summer-house and out-buildings, and the 
great trees clustered round about. He was fond of sport in 
the right way, that is, he treated it as sport and not busi¬ 
ness, and did not allow it to interfere with his prime work 
of being a successful farmer. He had big stock-yards 
for his cattle and swine, and he was growing all kinds of 
things of both the temperate and the tropic zones: wheat 
