A VARIED BAG 
411 
CH. XIV] 
scantily leaved tree to another as 1 disturbed them. At 
the foot of a steep bluff, several yards from the water, a 
crocodile lay. I broke its neck with a soft-nosed bullet 
from the little Springfield; for the plated skin of a 
crocodile offers no resistance to a modern rifle. We 
dragged the ugly man-eater up the bank, and sent one 
of the porters back to camp to bring out enough men to 
carry the brute in bodily. It was a female, containing 
thirty eggs. We did not find any crocodile’s nest; but 
near camp, in digging a hole for the disposal of refuse, 
we came on a clutch of a dozen eggs of the monitor 
lizard. They were in sandy loam, two feet and a half 
beneath the surface, without the vestige of a burrow 
leading to them. When exposed to the sun, unlike 
the crocodile’s eggs, they soon burst. Evidently the 
young are hatched in the cool earth and dig their way 
out. 
We continued our walk, and soon came on some kob. 
At two hundred yards I got a fine buck, though he 
went a quarter of a mile. Then, at a hundred and fifty 
yards, I dropped a straw-coloured Nile hartebeest. 
Sending in the kob and hartebeest used up all our 
porters but two, and I mounted the little mule and 
turned toward camp, having been out three hours. 
Soon Gouvimali pointed out a big bustard, marching 
away through the grass a hundred yards off. I dis¬ 
mounted, shot him through the base of the neck, and 
remounted. Then Kongoni pointed out, some distance 
ahead, a bushbuck ram, of the harnessed kind found in 
this part of the Nile Valley. Hastily dismounting, and 
stealing rapidly from ant-heap to ant-heap, until 1 was 
not much over a hundred yards from him, I gave him a 
fatal shot; but the bullet was placed a little too far 
back, and he could still go a considerable distance. So 
