658 
African Game Trails 
were grazing as if they had been ante¬ 
lope; her stomach contained nothing but 
chopped green grass. Wart-hogs are com¬ 
mon throughout the country over which 
we hunted. They are hideous beasts, with 
strange protuberances on their cheeks; and 
when alarmed they trot or gallop away, hold¬ 
ing the tail perfectly erect with the tassel 
bent forward. Usually they are seen in 
family parties, but a big boar will often be 
alone. If the weather is cloudy or wet they 
may be out all day long, but in hot, dry 
weather we generally found them abroad 
in the morning and evening. A pig is al¬ 
ways a comical animal; even more so than 
is the case with a bear, which also impres¬ 
ses one with a sense of grotesque humor 
—and this notwithstanding the fact that 
both boar and bear may be very formidable 
creatures. A wart-hog standing alertly at 
gaze, head and tail up, legs straddled out, 
and ears cocked forward, is rather a figure 
of fun; and not the less so when with char¬ 
acteristic suddenness he bounces round with 
a grunt and scuttles madly off to safety. 
Wart-hogs are beasts of the bare plain or 
open forest, and though they will often lie 
up in patches of brush they do not care for 
thick timber. 
After shooting the wart-hog we marched 
on to our camp at Bondoni. The gun- 
bearers were Mohammedans and the dead 
pig was of no service to them; and at their 
request I walked out while camp was being 
pitched and shot them a buck; this I had to 
do now and then, but I always shot males, 
so as not to damage the species. 
Next day we marched to the foot of Kili- 
makiu Mountain, near Captain Slatter’s 
ostrich farm. Our route lay across bare 
plains thickly covered with withered short 
grass. All around us as we marched were 
the game herds, zebras and hartebeests, 
gazelles of the two kinds, and now and 
then wildebeests. Hither and thither over 
the plain, crossing and recrossing, ran the 
dusty game trails, each with its myriad 
hoof-marks; the round hoof-prints of the 
zebra, the heart-shaped marks that showed 
where the hartebeest herd had trod, and the 
delicate etching that betrayed where the 
smaller antelope had passed. Occasion¬ 
ally we crossed the trails of the natives, 
worn deep in the hard soil by the countless 
thousands of bare or sandalled feet that had 
trodden them. Africa is a country of trails. 
Across the high veldt, in every direction, run 
the tangled trails of the multitudes of game 
that have lived thereon from time imme¬ 
morial. The great beasts of the marsh and 
the forest make thereon broad and muddy 
trails which often offer the only pathway 
by which a man can enter the sombre 
depths. In wet ground and dry alike are 
also found the trails of savage man. They 
lead from village to village, and in places 
they stretch for hundreds of miles, where 
trading parties have worn them in the search 
for ivory, or in the old days when raiding 
or purchasing slaves. The trails made 
by the men are made much as the beasts 
make theirs. They are generally longer and 
better defined, although I have seen hippo 
tracks more deeply marked than any made 
by savage man. But they are made simply 
by men following in one another’s footsteps, 
and they are never quite straight. They 
bend now a little to one side, now a little to 
the other, and sudden loops mark the spot 
where some vanished obstacle once stood; 
around it the first trail makers went, and 
their successors have ever trodden in their 
footsteps, even though the need for so doing 
has long passed away. 
Our camp at Kilimakiu was by a grove 
of shady trees, and from it at sunset we 
looked across the vast plain and saw the 
far-off mountains grow umber and purple 
as the light waned. Back of the camp, and 
of the farm-house near which we were, rose 
Kilimakiu Mountain, beautifully studded 
with groves of trees of many kinds. On its 
farther side lived a tribe of the Wkamba. 
Their chief with all the leading men of his 
village came in state to call upon me, and 
presented me with a fat hairy sheep, of the 
ordinary kind found in this part of Africa, 
where the sheep very wisely do not grow 
wool. The headman was dressed in khaki, 
and showed me with pride an official docu¬ 
ment which confirmed him in his position 
by direction of the government, and re¬ 
quired him to perform various acts, chiefly 
in the way of preventing his tribes people 
from committing robbery or murder, and of 
helping to stamp out cattle disease. Like 
all the Wkamba they had flocks of goats and 
sheep, and herds of humped cattle; but 
they were much in need of meat and hailed 
my advent. They were wild savages with 
filed teeth, many of them stark naked, 
though some of them carried a blanket. 
