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AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
inghame and I would spend the day hunting in the waterless 
country back of the river, where the heat at mid-day was 
terrific. We might not reach camp until after nightfall. 
Once as we came to it in the dark it seemed as if ghostly 
arms stretched above it; for on this evening the tents had 
been pitched under trees up which huge rubber vines had 
climbed^ and their massive dead-white trunks and branches 
glimmered pale and ghostly in the darkness. 
Twice my gun-bearers tried to show me a cheetah; but 
my eyes were too slow to catch the animal before it bounded 
off in safety among the bushes. Another time after an ex¬ 
cellent bit of tracking, the gun-bearers brought me up to a 
buffalo bull, standing for his noonday rest in the leafless 
thorns a mile from the river. I thought I held the heavy 
Holland straight for his shoulder, but I must have fired 
high; for though he fell to the shot he recovered at once. 
We followed the blood spoor for an hour, the last part of 
the time when the trail wandered among and through the 
heavy thickets under the trees on the river banks; here I 
walked beside the tracker with my rifle at full cock, for we 
could not tell what instant we might be charged. But his 
trail finally crossed the river, and as he was going stronger 
and stronger we had to abandon the chase. In the water¬ 
less country, away from the river, we found little except 
herds of zebra, of both kinds, occasional oryx and eland, and 
a few giraffe. A stallion of the big kangani zebra which I 
shot stood fourteen hands high at the withers and weighed 
about eight hundred and thirty pounds,* according to the 
^ The aggregate of the weights of the different pieces was 778 pounds; the loss of 
blood and the drying of the pieces of flesh in the intense heat of the sun we thought 
certainly accounted for 50 pounds more. The stallion was not fat. At any rate 
it weighed between 800 and 850 pounds. Its testicles, though fully developed, had 
