144 
ON SAFARI 
February 14,1 managed to place a *450 solid ball within 
some decimals of that spot with manifest and immediate 
results, the huge bull rolling over and over, wallowing 
in the water for over half-an-hour, all ends up. Now 
his four stumpy legs were in sight, anon the vast head 
and fore-end reared up to fall back with sounding splash, 
churning the still green surface into crimson foam. 
After thirty minutes of this flurry, this apparent death 
agony, the beast subsided, though we could still hear 
grunts and groans from the depths below. I left men 
to watch for his reappearance, and at five that afternoon 
was gratified to receive the report, “ Him finish.” 
Next morning we set out at 4 a.m., twenty hands, 
with ropes and axes and the rest to bring him in. But 
it proved a day of bitter disappointment—the cup 
dashed from one’s lips 1 For not a sign of this, or of 
my other wounded hippo, did we ever see : whether a 
hippo can recover from such a blow, 1 or whether he 
goes ashore to die, at least the trophies were lost to me, 
and no better luck had befallen my brother. After this 
week of labour, up half the nights and most of the 
days, struggling through the roughest places on earth, 
canebrakes, thorn-jungle, cruel rocks and lava, under 
an equatorial sun, or a waning moon—the hippo had 
beaten us. 
On Lake Elmenteita we noticed the assemblages of 
swallows preparing for their northward journey. The 
earliest of these mobilisations occurred on February 14, 
when they congregated in thousands on the islets, 
crowding the low thorns. By February 17 all these 
swallows had passed on ; but we observed similar assem¬ 
blages at various other points up to the end of March. 
On the afternoon of February 13, during a heavy 
shower of rain, we enjoyed quite a chorus of song-birds ; 
but this ceased on the sun coming out an hour or so 
later. On the 15th a skylark (of sorts) began to sing. 
Its note was inferior to that of our species ; but its 
1 Mr. Jackson writes me: “ They do recover.” See also his 
remarks in Big Game Shooting , Badminton Library, I, p. 273. 
