280 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
I could do. My men feasted on oryx and eland^ while I re¬ 
served the tongues and tenderloins for myself. Each day 
I hunted for eight or ten hours, something of interest always 
happening. I would not shoot at the gazelles; and the 
game I did want was so shy that almost all my shots were 
at long range, and consequently a number of them did not 
hit. However, I came on my best oryx in rather thick bush, 
and killed it at a hundred and twenty-five yards, as it 
turned with a kind of sneeze of alarm or curiosity, and 
stood broadside to me, the sun glinting on its handsome 
coat and polished black horns. One of my Kikuyu followers 
packed the skin entire to camp. I had more trouble with 
another oryx, wounding it one evening at three hundred 
and fifty yards, and next morning following the trail and 
after much hard work and a couple of misses killing it with 
a shot at three hundred yards. On September 2, I found 
two newly born oryx calves. The color of the oryx made 
them less visible than hartebeest when a long way off on 
the dry plains. I noticed that whenever we saw them 
mixed in a herd with zebra, it was the zebra that first struck 
our eyes. But in bright sunlight, in bush, I also noticed 
that the zebra themselves were hard to see. 
One afternoon, while skirting the edge of a marsh 
teeming with waders and water-fowl, I came across four 
stately Kavirondo cranes, specimens of which bird the 
naturalists had been particularly anxious to secure. They 
were not very shy for cranes, but they would not keep still, 
and I missed a shot with the Springfield as they walked 
along about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me. How¬ 
ever, they were unwise enough to circle round me when 
they rose, still keeping the same distance, and all the time 
