162 
African Game Trails 
plantations of cotton, plaintains, yams, 
millet, and beans. It is the capital of 
Unyoro, where the king lives, as well as 
three or four English officials, and Episco¬ 
palian and Roman Catholic missionaries. 
The king, accompanied by his prime min¬ 
ister and by the English Commissioner, 
called on me, and I gave him five o’clock 
tea; he is a Christian, as are most of his 
the jackals wailed with shrill woe among 
the gardens. 
From Hoima we entered a country cov¬ 
ered with the tall, rank elephant grass. It 
was traversed by papyrus-bordered streams 
and broken by patches of forest. The date 
palms grew tall, and among the trees were 
some with orange-red flowers like trumpet 
flowers, growing in grape-shaped clusters; 
The dead tusker. 
chiefs and headmen, and they are sending 
their children to the mission schools. 
A heron, about the size of our night 
heron but with a longer neck, and with a 
curiously crow-like voice, strolled about 
among the native houses at Hoima; and 
the kites almost brushed us with their wings 
as they swooped down for morsels of food. 
The cheerful, confiding little wagtails 
crossed the threshold of the rest house in 
which we sat. Black and white crows and 
vultures came around camp; and hand¬ 
some, dark hawks, with white on their 
wings and tails, and with long, conspicuous 
crests, perched upright on the trees. There 
were many kinds of doves; one pretty little 
fellow was but six inches long. At night 
and both the flowers and the seed-pods 
into which they turned stood straight up in 
rows above the leafy tops of the trees that 
bore them. 
The first evening, as we sat in the cool, 
open cane rest house, word was brought us 
that an elephant was close at hand. We 
found him after ten minutes’ walk; a young 
bull, with very small tusks, not worth shoot¬ 
ing. For three-quarters of an hour we 
watched him, strolling about and feeding, 
just on the edge of a wall of high elephant 
grass. Although we were in plain sight, 
ninety yards off, and sometimes moved 
about, he never saw us; for an elephant’s 
eyes are very bad. He was feeding on some 
thick, luscious grass, in the usual leisurely 
