406 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
the grass, and now and then turned a small tree nearly 
white by all perching in it. The little bank swallows came 
in myriads; exactly the same, by the way, as our familiar 
home friends, for the bank swallow is the most widely 
distributed of all birds. The most conspicuous attend¬ 
ants of the fires, however, were the bee-eaters, the largest 
and handsomest we had yet seen, their plumage every 
shade of blended red and rose, varied with brilliant blue 
and green. The fires seemed to bother the bigger animals 
hardly at all. The game did not shift their haunts, or do 
more than move in quite leisurely fashion out of the line of 
advance of the flames. I saw two oribi which had found a 
patch of short grass that split the fire, feeding thereon, 
entirely undisturbed, although the flames were crackling 
by some fifty yards on each side of them. Even the mice 
and shrews did not suffer much, probably because they 
went into holes. Shrews, by the way, were very plentiful, 
and Loring trapped four kinds, two of them new. It was 
always a surprise to me to find these tiny shrews swarming 
in Equatorial Africa just as they swarm in Arctic America. 
In a little patch of country not far from this camp there 
were a few sleeping-sickness fly, and one or two of us were 
bitten, but, seemingly, the fly were not infected, although 
at this very time eight men were dying of sleeping sickness 
at Wadelai where we had stopped. There were also some 
ordinary tsetse fly, which caused us uneasiness about our 
mule. We had brought four little mules through Uganda, 
riding them occasionally on safari; and had taken one 
across into the Lado, while the other three, with the bulk 
of the porters, marched on the opposite bank of the Nile 
from Koba, and were to join us at Nimule. 
