260 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
The following day the two hunters rode back to Meru, 
making a long circle. The elephants they saw were not 
worth shooting, but they killed the finest rhinoceros we had 
yet seen. They saw it in an open space of tall grass, sur¬ 
rounded by lantana brush, a flowering shrub with close¬ 
growing stems, perhaps twenty feet high and no thicker 
than a man’s thumb; it forms a favorite cover for elephants 
and rhinoceros, and is wellnigh impenetrable to hunters. 
Fortunately this particular rhino was outside it, and Ker- 
mit and Tarlton got up to about twenty-five yards from 
him. Kermit then put one bullet behind his shoulder, 
and as he whipped round to charge, another bullet on the 
point of his shoulder; although mortally wounded, he 
showed no signs whatever of being hurt, and came at the 
hunters with great speed and savage desire to do harm. 
Then an extraordinary thing happened. Tarlton fired, ^ 
inflicting merely a flesh wound in one shoulder, and the 
big, fearsome brute, which had utterly disregarded the two 
fatal shots, on receiving this flesh wound, wheeled and ran. 
Both firing, they killed him before he had gone many yards. 
He was a bull, with a thirty-inch horn. 
By this time Cuninghame and Heller had finished the 
skin and skeleton of the bull they were preserving. Near 
the carcass Heller trapped an old male leopard, a savage 
beast; its skin was in fine shape, but it was not fat, and 
weighed just one hundred pounds. Now we all joined, 
and shifted camp to a point eight or nine miles distant 
from Meru boma, and fifteen hundred feet lower among the 
foot-hills. It was much hotter at this lower level; palms 
were among the trees that bordered the streams. On the 
day we shifted camp Tarlton and I rode in advance to 
