The rhino stood looking at us with his big ears cocked forward.—Page 519. 
of the Athi, with the lyrate shape of the 
horns tending to be carried to an extreme 
of spread and backward bend. The tom¬ 
my bucks carried good horns; the horns 
of the does were usually aborted, and were 
never more than four or five inches long. 
The most notable feature about the tom¬ 
mies was the incessant switching of their 
tails, as if jerked by electricity. In the 
Sotik the topis all seemed to have calves of 
about the same age, as if born from four to 
six months earlier; the young of the other 
game were of every age. The males of all 
the antelope fought much among them¬ 
selves. The gazelle bucks of both species 
would face one another, their heads be¬ 
tween the forelegs and the horns level with 
the ground, and each would punch his op¬ 
ponent until the hair flew. 
Watching the game, one was struck by 
the intensity and the evanescence of their 
emotions. Civilized man now usually 
passes his life under conditions which elim¬ 
inate the intensity of terror felt by his an¬ 
cestors when death by violence was their 
normal end, and threatened them during 
every hour of the day and night. It is only 
in nightmares that the average dweller in 
516 
civilized countries now undergoes the hid¬ 
eous horror which was the regular and 
frequent portion of his ages-vanished fore¬ 
fathers, and which is still an everyday inci¬ 
dent in the lives of most wild creatures. 
But the dread is short-lived, and its horror 
vanishes with instantaneous rapidity. In 
these wilds the game dreaded the lion and 
the other flesh-eating beasts rather than 
man. We saw innumerable kills of all the 
buck, and of zebra, the neck being usually 
dislocated, and it being evident that none of 
the lion’s victims, not even the truculent 
wildebeeste or huge eland, had been able to 
make any fight against him. The game is 
ever on the alert against this greatest of 
foes, and every herd, almost every indi¬ 
vidual, is in imminent and deadly peril 
every few days or nights, and of course 
suffers in addition from countless false 
alarms. But no sooner is the danger over 
than the animals resume their feeding, or 
love making, or their fighting among them¬ 
selves. Two bucks will do battle the 
minute the herd has stopped running from 
the foe that has seized one of its number, 
and a buck resumes his love making with 
ardor, in the brief interval between the first 
