TO LAKE NAIVASHA 
217 
a second or two by a succession of similar sounds, uttered 
more quickly and in a lower tone. These big owls fre¬ 
quently came round camp after dark, and at first their 
notes completely puzzled me, as I thought they must be 
made by some beast. The bulbuls sang well. Most of 
the birds were in no way like our home birds. 
Loring trapped quantities of mice and rats, and it was 
curious to see how many of them had acquired characters 
which caused them superficially to resemble American 
animals with which they had no real kinship. The sand 
rats that burrowed in the dry plains were in shape, in color^ 
eyes, tail, and paws strikingly like our pocket gophers, 
which have similar habits. So the long-tailed gerbilles, 
or gerbille-like rats, resembled our kangaroo rats; and 
there was a blunt-nosed, stubby-tailed little rat superficially 
hardly to be told from our rice rat. But the most charac¬ 
teristic rodent, the big long-tailed, jumping springhaas, re¬ 
sembled nothing of ours; and there were tree rats and 
spiny mice. There were gray monkeys in the trees around 
camp, which the naturalists shot. 
Heller trapped various beasts; beautifully marked 
genets, and a big white-tailed mongoose which was very 
savage. But his most remarkable catch was a leopard. He 
had set a steel trap, fastened to a loose thorn-branch, for 
mongoose, civets, or jackals; it was a number two Blake, 
such as in America we use for coons, skunks, foxes, and 
perhaps bobcats and coyotes. In the morning he found 
it gone, and followed the trail of the thorn-branch until 
it led into a dense thicket, from which issued an ominous 
growl. His native boy shouted ‘‘simba’’; but it was a 
leopard, not a lion. He could not see into the thicket; so 
