392 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiy 
very abundant, hanging in the thinly-leaved acacias 
around the tents, and, as everywhere else, were crepus¬ 
cular—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 swal¬ 
lows, 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 phcebe-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¬ 
bourhood, 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 feeding. 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- 
pipe, once or twice whinnying or neighing; but usually 
making a succession of grunts or bubbling squeals 
