260 
African Game Trails 
the plains were trees, generally thorns, but 
other kinds also, among them palms and 
euphorbias. 
The following morning, forty-eight hours 
after leaving Butiaba, on Lake Albert Ny- 
anza, we disembarked from the little flotilla 
which had carried us—a crazy little steam 
launch, two sail-boats, and two big row¬ 
boats. We made our camp close to the 
river’s edge, on the Lado side, in a thin 
grove of scattered thorn-trees. The grass 
grew rank and tall all about us. Our tents 
were pitched, and the grass huts of the 
porters built, on a kind of promontory, the- 
main stream running past one side, while 
on the other was a bay. The nights were 
hot, and the days burning; the mosquitoes 
came with darkness, sometimes necessitat¬ 
ing our putting on head nets and gloves in 
the evenings, and they would have made 
sleep impossible if we had not had mos¬ 
quito biers. Nevertheless it was a very 
pleasarit camp, and we thoroughly enjoyed 
it. It was a wild, lonely country, and we 
saw no human beings except an occasional 
party of naked savages armed with bows 
and poisoned arrows. Game was plentiful, 
and a hunter always enjoys a permanent 
camp in a good game country; for while 
the expedition is marching, his movements 
must largely be regulated by those of the 
safari, whereas at a permanent camp he is 
foot-loose. 
There was an abundance of animal life, 
big and little, about our camp. In the 
reeds, and among the water-lilies of the bay, 
there were crocodiles, monitor lizards six 
feet long, and many water birds—herons, 
flocks of beautiful white egrets, clamorous 
spur-winged plover, sacred ibis, noisy pur¬ 
ple ibis, saddle-billed storks, and lily trot¬ 
ters which ran lightly over the lily pads. 
There were cormorants and snake birds. 
Fish eagles screamed as they circled around; 
very handsome birds, the head, neck, tail, 
breast, and forepart of the back white, the 
rest of the plumage black and rich chest¬ 
nut. There was a queer little eagle owl 
with inflamed red eyelids. The black and 
red bulbuls sang noisily. There were many 
kingfishers, some no larger than chippy 
sparrows, and many of them brilliantly 
colored; some had, and others had not, the 
regular kingfisher voice; and while some 
dwelt by the river bank and caught fish, 
others did not come near the water and 
lived on insects. There were paradise fly¬ 
catchers with long, wavy white tails; and 
olive-green pigeons with yellow bellies. 
Red-headed, red-tailed lizards ran swiftly 
up and down the trees. The most extraor¬ 
dinary birds were the nightjars; the cocks 
carried in each wing one very long, waving 
plume, the pliable quill being twice the 
length of the bird’s body and tail, and bare 
except for a patch of dark feather-webbing 
at the end. The two big, dark plume tips 
were very conspicuous, trailing behind the 
bird as it flew, and so riveting the observer’s 
attention as to make the bird itself almost 
escape notice. When seen flying, the first 
impression conveyed was of two large, dark 
moths or butterflies fluttering rapidly 
through the air; it was with a positive 
effort of the eye that I fixed the actual bird. 
The big slate and yellow bats were more in¬ 
teresting still. There were several kinds of 
bats at this camp; a small dark kind that 
appeared only when night had fallen and 
flew very near the ground all night long, 
and a somewhat larger one, lighter beneath, 
which appeared late in the evening and 
flew higher in the air. Both of these had 
the ordinary bat habits of continuous, 
swallow-like flight. But the habits of the 
slate and yellow bats were utterly different. 
They were very abundant, hanging in the 
thinly leaved acacias around the tents, and, 
as everywhere else, were crepuscular, in¬ 
deed to a large extent actually diurnal, in 
habit. They saw well and flew well by day¬ 
light, passing the time hanging from twigs. 
They became active before sunset. In 
catching insects they behaved not like swal¬ 
lows but like flycatchers. Except that they 
perched upside down so to speak, that is, 
that they hung from the twigs instead of 
sitting on them, their conduct was precisely 
that of a phoebe bird or a wood peewee. 
Each bat hung from its twig until it espied a 
passing insect, when it swooped down upon 
it, and after a short flight returned with its 
booty to the same perch or went on to a 
new one close by; and it kept twitching 
its long ears as it hung head downward 
devouring its prey. 
There were no native villages in our im¬ 
mediate neighborhood, and the game was 
not shy. There were many buck: water- 
buck, kob, hartebeest, bushbuck, reedbuck, 
oribi, and duiker. Every day or two Kermit 
or I would shoot a buck for the camp. We 
