446 
THE GIANT ELAND 
[CH. XV 
and women stark naked, and their bodies daubed with 
mud, grease, and ashes to keep off the mosquitoes. 
On March 4 we were steaming slowly along the 
reedy, water-soaked shores of Lake No, keeping a sharp 
lookout for the white-eared kob, and especially for the 
handsome saddle-marked lechwe kob, which has been 
cursed with the foolishly inappropriate name of “ Mrs. 
Gray’s waterbuck.” 
Early in the morning we saw a herd of these saddle- 
marked lechwe in the long marsh grass, and pushed the 
steamer’s nose as near to the shore as possible. Then 
Cuninghame, keen-eyed Kongoni, and I started for what 
proved to be a five hours’ tramp. The walking was 
hard ; sometimes we were on dry land, but more often 
in water up to our ankles or knees, and occasionally 
floundering and wallowing up to our hips through 
stretches of reeds, water-lilies, green water, and foul 
black slime. Yet there were ant-hills in the marsh. 
Once or twice we caught a glimpse of the game in small 
patches of open ground covered with short grass, but 
almost always they kept to the high grass and reeds. 
There were with the herd two very old bucks, with a 
white saddle-shaped patch on the withers, the white 
extending up the back of the neck to the head—a mark 
of their being in full maturity, or past it, for on some of 
the males at least this coloration only begins to appear 
when they seem already to have attained their growth 
of horn and body, their teeth showing them to be five 
or six years old, while they are obviously in the prime 
of vigour and breeding capacity. Unfortunately, in the 
long grass it was impossible to single out these old 
bucks. Marking as well as we could the general direc¬ 
tion of the herd, we would steal toward it until we 
thought we were in the neighbourhood, and then 
