402 RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO [ch. xiv 
On the ashes of the fresh burn the footprints of the 
game showed almost as distinctly as on snow. One 
morning we saw where a herd of elephant, cows and 
calves, had come down the night before to drink at a 
big bay of the Nile, three or four miles north of our 
camp. Numerous hippo tracks showed that during the 
darkness these beasts wandered freely a mile or two 
inland. They often wandered behind our camp at 
night. Always beside these night-trails we found 
withered remnants of water cabbage and other aquatic 
plants which they had carried inland with them—I 
suppose accidentally on their backs. On several occa¬ 
sions where we could only make out scrapes on the 
ground the hippo trails puzzled us, being so far inland 
that we thought they might be those of rhinos, until we 
would come on some patch of ashes or of soft soil where 
we could trace the four toe-marks. The rhino has but 
three toes, the one in the middle being very big; it 
belongs, with the tapir and horse, to the group of 
ungulates which tends to develop one digit of each foot 
at the expense of all the others, a group which in a 
long-past geological age was the predominant ungulate 
group of the world. The hippo, on the contrary, belongs 
to the class of such cloven-hoofed creatures as the cow 
and pig, in the group of ungulates which has developed 
equally two main digits in each foot—a group much 
more numerously represented than the other in the 
world of to-day. 
As the hippos grew familiar with the camp they 
became bolder and more venturesome after nightfall. 
They grunted and brayed to one another throughout 
the night, splashed and wallowed among the reeds, and 
came close to the tents during their dry-land rambles in 
the darkness. One night, in addition to the hippo 
