444 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
Hudsonian chickadees of the North Woods I never saw 
such tame little birds. 
At Gondokoro we met the boat which the Sirdar, Major 
General Sir Reginald Wingate, had sent to take us down 
the Nile to Khartoum; for he, and all the Soudan officials 
—including especially Colonel Asser, Colonel Owen, Slatin 
Pasha, and Butler Bey—treated us with a courtesy for 
which I cannot too strongly express my appreciation. In 
the boat we were to have met an old friend and fellow 
countryman, Leigh Hunt; to our great regret he could 
not meet us, but he insisted on treating us as his guests, 
and on our way down the Nile we felt as if we were on the 
most comfortable kind of yachting trip; and everything 
was done for us by Captain Middleton, the Scotch en¬ 
gineer in charge. 
Nor was our debt only to British officials and to Ameri¬ 
can friends. At Gondokoro I was met by M. Ranquet, the 
Belgian Commandant of the Lado district and, both he 
and M. Massart, the Chef de Poste at Redjaf, were kind¬ 
ness itself, and aided us in every way. 
From Gondokoro Kermit and I crossed to Redjaf, for 
an eight days’ trip after the largest and handsomest, and one 
of the least known, of African antelopes, the giant eland. 
We went alone, because all the other white men of the 
party were down with dysentery or fever. We had with us 
sixty Uganda porters and a dozen mules sent us by the 
Sirdar, together with a couple of our little riding mules, 
which we used now and then for a couple of hours on safari, 
or in getting to the actual hunting ground. As always 
when only one or two of us went, or when the safari was 
short, we travelled light^ with no dining-tent and nothing 
