THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 399 
slate and yellow bats were utterly different. They were 
very abundant, hanging in the thinly leaved acacias around 
the tents, and, as everywhere else, were crepuscular, indeed 
to a large extent actually diurnal, in habit. They saw 
well and flew well by daylight, passing the time hanging 
from twigs. They became active before sunset. In catching 
insects they behaved not like swallows but like flycatchers. 
Except that they perched upside down so to speak, that is, 
that they hung from the twigs instead of sitting on them, 
their conduct was precisely that of a phoebe bird or a wood 
peewee. Each bat hung from its twig until it espied a 
passing insect, when it swooped down upon it, and after 
a short flight returned with its booty to the same perch 
or went on to a new one close by; and it kept twitching 
its long ears as it hung head downward devouring its prey. 
There were no native villages in our immediate neigh¬ 
borhood, and the game was not shy. There were many 
buck: waterbuck, kob, hartebeest, bushbuck, reedbuck, 
oribi, and duiker. Every day or two Kermit or I would 
shoot a buck for the camp. We generally went out together 
with our gun-bearers, Kermit striding along in front, with 
short trousers and leggings, his knees bare. Sometimes only 
one of us would go out. The kob and waterbuck were 
usually found in bands, and were perhaps the commonest 
of all. The buck seemed to have no settled time for feed¬ 
ing. Two oribi which I shot were feeding right in the open, 
just at noon, utterly indifferent to the heat. There were 
hippo both in the bay and in the river. All night long 
we could hear them splashing, snorting, and grunting; 
they were very noisy, sometimes uttering a strange, long- 
drawn bellow, a little like the exhaust of a giant steam- 
