262 
African Game Trails 
generally went out together with our gun- 
bearers, Kermit striding along in front, 
with short trousers and leggings, his knees 
bare. Sometimes only one of us would go 
out. The kob and waterbuck were usually 
found in bands, and were perhaps the com¬ 
monest of all. The buck seemed to have 
no settled time for feeding. Two oribi 
which I shot were feeding right in the open, 
just at noon, utterly indifferent to the heat. 
There were hippo both in the bay and in 
the river. All night long we could hear 
whole it has not much diminished, some 
species have actually increased, and none 
is in danger of immediate extinction, unless 
it be the white rhinoceros. During the 
last decade, for instance, the buffalo have 
been recovering their lost ground through¬ 
out the Lado, Uganda, and British East 
Africa, having multiplied many times over. 
During the same period, in the same region, 
the elephant have not greatly diminished in 
aggregate numbers, although the number 
of bulls carrying big ivory has been very 
Male square-nosed rhino, shot by Kermit Roosevelt. 
From a photograph by Edmund Heller. 
them splashing, snorting, and grunting; 
they were very noisy, sometimes uttering a 
strange, long-drawn bellow, a little like the 
exhaust of a giant steam-pipe, once or twice 
whinnying or neighing; but usually making 
a succession of grunts, or bubbling squeals 
through the nostrils. The long grass was 
traversed in all directions by elephant trails, 
and there was much fresh sign of the huge 
beasts—their dung, and the wrecked trees 
on which they had been feeding; and there 
was sign of buffalo also. In middle Africa, 
thanks to wise legislation, and to the very 
limited size of the areas open to true settle¬ 
ment, there has been no such reckless, 
wholesale slaughter of big game as that 
which had brought the once wonderful big 
game fauna of South Africa to the verge of 
extinction. In certain small .areas of mid¬ 
dle Africa, of course, it has gone; but as a 
much reduced; indeed the reproductive 
capacity of the herds has probably been 
very little impaired, the energies of the 
hunters having been almost exclusively di¬ 
rected to the killing of the bulls with tusks 
weighing over thirty pounds apiece; and 
the really big tuskers, which are most ea¬ 
gerly sought after, are almost always past 
their prime, and no longer associate with 
the herd. 
But this does not apply to the great beast 
which was the object of our coming to the 
Lado, the square-mouthed or, as it is some¬ 
times miscalled, the white, rhinoceros. 
Africa is a huge continent, and many species 
of the big mammals inhabiting it are spread 
over a vast surface; and some of them offer 
strange problems for inquiry in the discon¬ 
tinuity of their distribution. The most ex¬ 
traordinary instance of this discontinuity 
