Scribner’s Magazine 
VOL. XLVI NOVEMBER, 1909 NO. 5 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS* 
AN ACCOUNT OF THE AFRICAN WANDERINGS OF AN AMERICAN 
HUNTER-NATURALIST 
By Theodore Roosevelt 
Illustrations from photographs by Kermit Roosevelt and other members 
OF THE EXPEDITION 
II.—ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH—LION-HUNTING ON THE 
KAPITI PLAINS 
giJHE house at which we were 
staying stood on the beauti¬ 
ful Kitanga hills. They were 
so named after an English¬ 
man, to whom the natives 
had given the name of Ki¬ 
tanga; some years ago, as we were told, he 
had been killed by a lion near where the 
ranch-house now stood; and we were shown 
his grave in the little Machakos graveyard. 
The house was one story high, clean and 
comfortable, with a veranda running round 
three sides; and on the veranda were lion 
skins and the skull of a rhinoceros. From 
the house we looked over hills and wide 
lonely plains; the green valley below, with 
its flat-topped acacias, was very lovely; and 
in the evening we could see, scores of miles 
away, the snowy summit of mighty Kiliman¬ 
jaro turn crimson in the setting sun. The 
twilights were not long; and when night 
fell, stars new to northern eyes flashed glori¬ 
ous in the sky. Above the horizon hung 
the Southern Cross, and directly opposite 
in the heavens was our old familiar friend 
the Wain, the Great Bear, upside down and 
pointing to a North Star so low that behind 
a hill we could not see it. It is a dry coun- 
* Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 
U. S. A. All rights reserved. 
try, and we saw it in the second year of a 
drought; yet I believe it to be a country of 
high promise for settlers of white race. In 
many ways it reminds one rather curiously 
of the great plains of the West, where they 
slope upward to the foothills of the Rock¬ 
ies. It is a white man’s country. Although 
under the equator, the altitude is so high 
that the nights are cool, and the region as a 
whole is very healthy. I saw many chil¬ 
dren, of the Boer immigrants, of English 
settlers, even of American missionaries, and 
they looked sound and well. Of course, 
there was no real identity in any feature; 
but again and again the general landscape 
struck me by its likeness to the cattle coun¬ 
try I knew so well. As my horse shuffled 
forward, under the bright, hot sunlight, 
across the endless flats or gently rolling 
slopes of brown and withered grass, I might 
have been on the plains anywhere, from 
Texas to Montana; the hills were just like 
our Western buttes; the half-dry water¬ 
courses were fringed with trees, just as if 
they had been the Sandy, or the Dry, or the 
Beaver, or the Cottonwood, or any of the 
multitude of creeks that repeat these and 
similar names, again and again, from the 
Panhandle to the Saskatchewan. Moreover 
a Westerner, far better than an Easterner, 
l Notice.—T hes 
Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. All rights re 
VOL. XLVI.— 59 
