African Game Trails 
23 
grown young one; but Cuninghame, scan¬ 
ning them through his glasses, and misled 
by the dark coloration, pronounced them 
a bull and cow; and after the big one I 
went. By good luck we were on one of the 
rare pieces of the country which was fitted 
for galloping. I rode at an angle to the 
giraffe’s line of flight, thus gaining con¬ 
siderably; and when it finally turned and 
went straight away I followed it at a fast 
run, and before it was fully awake to the 
danger I was but a hundred yards behind. 
We were now getting into bad country, and 
jumping off I opened fire and crippled the 
' great beast. Mounting, I overtook it again 
in a quarter of a mile and killed it. 
In half an hour the skinners and porters 
came up—one of the troubles of hunting 
as a naturalist is that it necessitates the 
presence of a long tail of men to take off 
and carry in the big skins, in order that 
they may ultimately appear in museums. 
In an hour and a half the giraffe’s skin, 
with the. head and the. leg bones, was slung 
on two poles;, eight porters bore it, while 
the others took for their own use all the 
nleat they could carry. They were in high 
good-humor, for. an abundant supply of 
fresh meat always means a season of re¬ 
joicing, and they started campwards sing¬ 
ing loudly under their heavy burdens. 
While the giraffe was being skinned we had 
seen a rhinoceros feeding near our line of 
march campwards, and had watched it un¬ 
til the light grew dim. By the time the 
skin was ready night had fallen, and we 
started under the brilliant moon. It lit up 
the entire landscape; but moonlight is not 
sunlight, and there was the chance of our 
stumbling on the rhino unawares, and of 
its charging; so I rode at the head of the 
column with full-jacketed bullets in my 
rifle. However, we never saw the rhino, 
nor had we any other adventure; and the 
ride through the moonlight which softened 
all the harshness, and gave a touch of 
magic and mystery to the landscape, was 
so pleasant that I was sorry when we caught 
the gleam of the camp-fires. 
Next day we sent our porters to bring in 
the rest of the giraffe meat and the ostrich 
eggs. The giraffe’s heart was good eating. 
There were many ticks on the giraffe, as on 
all the game hereabouts, and they annoyed 
us a little also,- although very far from being 
the plague they were on the Athi plain. 
Among the flies which at times tormented 
the horses and hung around the game, were 
big gadflies with long wings folded longi¬ 
tudinally down the back, not in the ordinary 
fly fashion; they were akin’ to the tsetse 
flies, one species of which is fatal to do¬ 
mestic animals, and another, the sleeping- 
sickness fly, to man himself. They pro¬ 
duce death by means of the fatal microbes 
introduced into the blood by their bite; 
whereas another African fly, the seroot, 
found more to the north, in the Nile coun¬ 
tries, is a scourge to man and beast merely 
because of its vicious bite, and where it 
swarms may drive the tribes that own herds 
entirely out of certain districts. 
One afternoon, while leading my horse 
because the ground was a litter of sharp- 
edged stones, I came out on a plain which 
was crawling with zebra. In every direc¬ 
tion there were herds of scores or of hun¬ 
dreds. They were all of the common or 
small kind, except three individuals of the 
big kangani, and were .tame, letting me 
walk by within easy shot. Other game 
was mixed in with them. Soon, walking 
over a little ridge of rocks, we saw a rhino 
sixty yards off. To walk forward would 
give it our wind; I did not wish to kill it; 
and I was beginning to feel, about rhino, the 
way Alice did in Looking Glass country, 
when the elephants “did bother so.” Hav¬ 
ing spied us the beast at once cocked its 
ears and tail, and assumed its usual absurd 
resemblance to a huge and exceedingly 
alert and interested pig. But with a rhino 
tragedy sometimes treads on the heels of 
comedy, and I watched it sharply, my rifle 
cocked, while I had all the men shout in 
unison to scare it away. The noise puz¬ 
zled it much; with tail erect and head toss¬ 
ing and twisting, it made little rushes hither 
and thither, but finally drew off. Next 
day, in shifting camp, Cuninghame and I 
were twice obliged to dismount and keep 
guard over the safari while it marched by 
within a hundred yards of a highly puzzled 
rhino, which trotted to and fro in the bush, 
evidently uncertain whether or not to let its 
bewilderment turn into indignation. 
The camp to which we thus shifted was 
on the banks of the Guaso Nyero, on the 
edge of an open glade in a shady grove of 
giant mimosas. It was a beautiful camp, 
and in the soft tropic nights I would sit out¬ 
side my tent and watch the full moon rising 
