526 
African Game Trails 
happenings; as was natural with a husband 
and father of such adventure-loving nature. 
They took a keen interest, untinged by the 
slightest nervousness, in every kind of wild 
creature from lions and leopards down. 
The game was in sight from the veranda of 
the house almost every hour of the day. 
Early one morning, in the mist, three 
hartebeests came right up to the wire fence, 
two score yards from the house itself; and 
the black-and-white striped zebra, and 
ruddy hartebeest, grazed or rested through 
the long afternoons in plain view, on the 
hill-sides opposite. 
It is hard for one who has not himself 
seen it to realize the immense quantities of 
game to be found on the Kapiti Plains and 
Athi Plains and the hills that bound them. 
The common game of the plains, the ani¬ 
mals of which I saw most while at Kitanga 
and in the neighborhood, were the zebra, 
wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant’s gazelle, and 
“Tommies” or Thompson’s gazelle; the 
zebra, and the hartebeest, usually known by 
the Swahili name of kongoni, being by far 
the most plentiful. Then there were im- 
palla, mountain reedbuck, duyker, stein- 
buck, and diminutive dikdik. As we trav¬ 
elled and hunted we were hardly ever out 
of sight of game; and on Pease’s farm it¬ 
self there were many thousand head; and 
so there were on Slatter’s. If wealthy men 
who desire sport of the most varied and 
interesting kind would purchase farms like 
these they could get, for much less money, 
many times the interest and enjoyment a 
deer-forest or grouse-moor can afford. 
Unless there was something special on, like 
a lion- or rhinoceros-hunt, I usually rode 
off followed only by my sais and gun-bear¬ 
ers. I cannot describe the beauty and the 
unceasing interest of these rides, through 
the teeming herds of game. It was like re¬ 
tracing the steps of time for sixty or seventy 
years, and being back in the days of Corn¬ 
wallis Harris and Gordon Cumming, in 
the palmy times of the giant fauna of South 
Africa big game. On Pease’s own farm one 
day I passed through scores of herds of the 
beautiful and wonderful wild creatures I 
have spoken of above; all told there were 
several thousands of them. With the ex¬ 
ception of the wildebeest, most of them w r ere 
not shy, and I could have taken scores of 
shots at a distance of a couple of hundred 
yards or thereabout. Of course, I did not 
shoot at anything unless we were out of 
meat or needed the skin for the collection; 
The third male lion shot by Mr. Roosevelt. 
From a photograph by Edmund Heller. 
