THE GUASO NYERO 
275 
Ciceronian theory, that he who throws the javelin all day 
must hit the mark some time. Accordingly I emptied the 
magazines of both my rifles at the oryx, as they ran across 
my front, and broke the neck of a fine cow, at four hundred 
and fifty yards. Six or seven hundred yards off the sur¬ 
vivors stopped, and the biggest bull, evidently much put 
out, uttered loud bawling grunts and drove the others 
round with his horns. Meanwhile I was admiring the 
handsome dun gray coat of my prize, its long tail and long, 
sharp, slender horns, and the bold black and white mark¬ 
ings on its face. Hardly had we skinned the carcass before 
the vultures lit on it; with them were two marabou storks, 
one of which I shot with a hard bullet from the Springfield. 
The oryx, like the roan and sable, and in striking con¬ 
trast to the eland, is a bold and hard fighter, and when 
cornered will charge a man or endeavor to stab a lion. If 
wounded it must be approached with a certain amount of 
caution. The eland, on the other hand, in spite of its 
huge size, is singularly mild and inoffensive, an old bull 
being as inferior to an oryx in the will and power to fight 
as it is in speed and endurance. ‘'Antelope,’’ as I have 
said, is a very loose term, meaning simply any hollow-horned 
ruminant that isn’t an ox, a sheep, or a goat. The eland is 
one of the group of tragelaphs, which are as different from 
the true antelopes* such as the gazelles, as they are from the 
oxen. One of its kinsfolk is the handsome little bushbuck, 
about as big as a white-tail deer; a buck of which Kermit 
had killed two specimens. The bushbuck is a wicked 
fighter, no other buck of its size being as dangerous; which 
makes the helplessness and timidity of its huge relative all 
the more striking. 
