448 
THE GIANT ELAND 
[CH. XV 
glimpse of two more of the herd rushing off to our right, 
and we heard another grunting and sneaking away, 
invisible, thirty yards or so to our left. 
Half an hour afterward I shot another buck, at over 
a hundred and fifty yards, after much the same kind of 
experience. At this one I fired four times, hitting him 
with three bullets ; three of the shots were taken when I 
could only see his horns and had to guess at the position 
of the body. This was a very big buck, with horns over 
twenty-nine inches long, but the saddle-mark was yellow, 
with many whitish hairs, showing that he was about to 
assume the white saddle of advanced maturity. His 
stomach was full of the fine swamp grass. 
These handsome antelopes come next to the situtunga 
as lovers of water and dwellers in the marshes. They 
are far more properly to be called “waterbuck” than 
are the present proprietors of that name, which, like the 
ordinary kob, though liking to be near streams, spend 
most of their time on dry plains and hill-sides. This 
saddle-marked antelope of the swamps has the hoofs 
very long and the whole foot flexible and spreading, so 
as to help it in passing over wet ground and soft mud ; 
the pasterns behind are largely bare of hair. It seems to 
be much like the lechwe, a less handsome, but equally 
water-loving, antelope of Southern Africa, which is put 
in the same genus with the waterbuck and kob. 
That afternoon Dr. Mearns killed with his Winchester 
*30 to *40, on the wing, one of the most interesting birds 
we obtained on our whole trip, the whale-billed stork. It 
was an old male, and its gizzard was full of the remains 
of small fish. The whalebill is a large wader, blackish- 
grey in colour, slightly crested, with big feet and a huge 
swollen bill—a queer-looking bird, with no near kinsfolk, 
and so interesting that nothing would have persuaded 
