656 
African Game Trails 
nightfall the multitude of fires lit up the 
darkness and showed the tents in shadowy 
outline; and around them squatted the por¬ 
ters, their faces flickering from dusk to 
ruddy light, as they chatted together or sud¬ 
denly started some snatch of wild African 
melody in which all their neighbors might 
join. xAfter a while the talk and laughter 
and singing would gradually die away, and 
lit fires was a welcome sight as we stumbled 
toward them through the darkness. Once 
in, each went to his tent to take a hot bath; 
and then, clean and refreshed, we sat down 
to a comfortable dinner, with game of some 
sort as the principal dish. 
On the first march after leaving our lion 
camp at Potha I shot a wart-hog. It was 
a good-sized sow, which, in company with 
as we white men sat around our fire, the 
silence would be unbroken except by the 
queer cry of a hyena, or much more rarely 
by a sound that always demanded atten¬ 
tion—the yawning grunt of a questing lion. 
If we wished to make an early start we 
would breakfast by dawn, and then we 
would usually return to camp for lunch. 
Otherwise we might be absent all day, car¬ 
rying our lunch with us. We might get in 
before sunset or we might be out till long 
after nightfall; and then the gleam of the 
several of her half-grown offspring, was 
grazing near our line of march; there were 
some thorn-trees which gave a little cover, 
and I killed her at a hundred and eighty 
yards, using the Springfield, the lightest and 
handiest of all my rifles. Her flesh was 
good to eat, and the skin, as with all our 
specimens, was saved for the National 
Museum. I did not again have to shoot a 
sow, although I killed half-grown pigs for 
the table, and boars for specimens. This 
sow and her porkers were not rooting, but 
