warthog boar; an almost unheard-of feat. 
They backed one another up with equal 
courage and adroitness, their aim being for 
two to seize the hind legs; then the third, 
watching his chance, would get one foreleg, 
when the boar was'speedily thrown, and when 
weakened, killed by bites in his stomach. 
Hitherto we had not obtained a bull 
hippo, and I made up my mind to devote 
myself to getting one, as otherwise the 
group for the Museum would be incom¬ 
plete. Save in exceptional cases I do not 
think hippo hunting, after the first one has 
been obtained, a very attractive sport, be¬ 
cause usually one has to wait an hour be¬ 
fore it is possible to tell whether or not a 
shot has been successful, and also because, 
a portion of the head being all that is usu¬ 
ally visible, it is exceedingly difficult to 
say whether the animal seen is a bull or a 
cow. As the time allowed for a shot is 
very short, and any hesitation probably in¬ 
sures the animal’s escape, this means that 
two or three hippo may be killed, quite un¬ 
avoidably, before the right specimen is se¬ 
cured. Still there may be interesting and 
536 
exciting incidents in a hippo hunt. Cun- 
inghame, the two Attenboroughs, and I 
started early in the launch, towing the big, 
clumsy row-boat, with as crew three of our 
porters who could row. We steamed down 
the lake some fifteen miles to a wide bay, 
indented by smaller bays, lagoons, and in¬ 
lets, all fringed by a broad belt of impene¬ 
trable papyrus, while the beautiful purple 
lilies, with their leathery-tough stems and 
broad surface-floating leaves, filled the shal¬ 
lows. At the mouth of the main bay we 
passed a floating island, a mass of papy¬ 
rus perhaps a hundred and fifty acres in 
extent, which had been broken off from the 
shore somewhere, and was floating over the 
lake as the winds happened to drive it. 
In an opening in the dense papyrus 
masses we left the launch moored, and 
Cuninghame and I started in the row¬ 
boat to coast the green wall of tall, thick¬ 
growing, feather-topped reeds. Under the 
bright sunshine the shallow flats were alive 
with bird life. Gulls, both the gray-hooded 
and the black-backed, screamed harshly 
overhead. The chestnut-colored lily trot- 
