African Game Trails 
19 
then gallop for a short distance; but the big 
bulls speedily begin to trot, and the cows 
and younger bulls gradually also drop back 
into the trot. In fact, their gaits are in es¬ 
sence those of the wapiti, which also prefer 
the trot, although wapiti never make the 
bounds that eland do at the start. The 
moose, however, is more essentially a trot¬ 
ter than either eland or wapiti; a very old 
and heavy moose never, when at speed, goes 
at any other gait than a trot, except that 
under the pressure of great and sudden 
danger it may perhaps make a few bounds. 
While at Meru Boma I received a cable, 
forwarded by native runners, telling me of 
Peary’s wonderful feat in reaching the 
North Pole. Of course we were all over¬ 
joyed, and in particular we Americans 
could not but feel a special pride in the 
fact that it was a fellow-countryman who 
had performed the great and noteworthy 
achievement. A little more than a year 
had passed since I said good-by to Peary as 
he started on his Arctic quest; after leaving 
New York in the Roosevelt, he had put into 
Oyster Bay to see us, and we had gone 
aboard the Roosevelt, had examined with 
keen interest how she was fitted for the bo¬ 
real seas and the boreal winter, and had 
then waved farewell to the tall, gaunt ex¬ 
plorer as he stood looking toward us over 
the side of the stout little ship.* 
On September 21 Kermit and Tarlton 
started south-west, toward Lake Hanning- 
ton, and Cuninghame and I north, toward 
the Guaso Nyero. Heller was under the 
weather, and we left him to spend a few 
days at Meru Boma, and then to take in the 
elephant skins, and other museum speci¬ 
mens, to Nairobi. 
As Cuninghame and I were to be nearly 
four weeks in a country with no food sup¬ 
plies, we took a small donkey safari to carry 
the extra food for our porters—for in these 
remote places the difficulty of taking in 
many hundred pounds of salt, as well as 
skin tents, and the difficulty of bringing out 
the skeletons and skins of the big animals 
collected, makes such an expedition as ours, 
undertaken for scientific purposes, far more 
cumbersome and unwieldy than a mere 
hunting trip, or even than a voyage of ex¬ 
ploration, and trebles the labor. 
* When I reached Neri I received from Peary the follow¬ 
ing cable: 
Your farewell w'asi a royal mascot. The Po1<ms ours. ( 
A long day’s march brought us down to 
the hot country. That evening we pitched 
our tents by a rapid brook, bordered by 
palms, whose long, stiff fronds rustled 
ceaselessly in the wind. Monkeys swung 
in the tree-tops. On the march I shot a 
Kavirondo crane on the wing, with the little 
Springfield, almost exactly repeating my 
experience with the other crane which I had 
shot three weeks before, except that on this 
occasion I brought down the bird with my 
third bullet, and then wasted the last two 
cartridges in the magazine at his compan¬ 
ions. At dusk the donkeys were driven to a 
fire within the camp, and they stood pa¬ 
tiently round it in a circle throughout the 
night, safe from lions and hyenas. 
The day’s march brought us to another 
small tributary of the Guaso Nyero, a little 
stream twisting rapidly through the plain 
between its sheer banks. Here and there it 
was edged with palms and beds of bul¬ 
rushes. We pitched the tents close to half 
a dozen flat-topped thorn-trees. We spent 
several days at this camp. Many kites 
came around the tents, but neither vultures 
nor ravens. The country was a vast plain 
bounded on almost every hand by chains of 
far-off mountains. In the south-west, just 
beyond the equator, the snows of Kenia 
lifted toward the sky. To the north the 
barren ranges were grim with the grimness 
of the desert. The flats were covered with 
pale, bleached grass which waved all day 
long in the wind; for though there were 
sometimes calms, or changes in the wind, 
on most of the days we were out it never 
ceased blowing from some point in the 
south. In places the parched soil was 
crumbling and rotten; in other places it 
was thickly strewn with volcanic stones; 
there were but few tracts over which a horse 
could gallop at speed, although neither the 
rocks nor the rotten soil seemed to hamper 
the movements of the game. Here and 
there were treeless stretches. Elsewhere 
there were occasional palms; and trees 
thirty or forty feet high, seemingly cactus or 
aloes, which looked even more like candel¬ 
abra than the euphorbia which is thus 
named; and a scattered growth of thorn- 
trees and bushes. The thorn-trees were of 
many kinds. One bore only a few leath¬ 
ery leaves, the place of foliage being taken 
by the mass of poisonous-looking, fleshy 
spines which, together with the ends of the 
