African Game Trails 
269 
actly the same, by the way, as our familiar 
home friends, for the bank swallow is the 
most widely distributed of all birds. The 
most conspicuous attendants of the fires, 
however, were the bee-eaters, the largest 
and handsomest we had yet seen, their 
plumage every shade of blended red and 
rose, varied with brilliant blue and green. 
The fires seemed to bother the bigger ani¬ 
mals hardly at all. The game did not shift 
their haunts, or do more than move in quite 
fly, and one or two of us were bitten, but, 
seemingly, the fly were not infected, al¬ 
though at this very time eight men were dy¬ 
ing of sleeping sickness at Wadelai where 
we had stopped. There were also some 
ordinary tsetse fly, which caused us un¬ 
easiness about our mule. We had brought 
four little mules through Uganda, riding 
them occasionally on safari; and had taken 
one across into the Lado, while the other 
three, with the bulk of the porters, marched 
leisurely fashion out of the line of advance 
of the flames. I saw two oribi which had 
found a patch of short grass that split the 
fire, feeding thereon, entirely undisturbed, 
although the flames were crackling by some 
fifty yards on each side of them. Even the 
mice and shrews did not suffer much, prob¬ 
ably because they went into holes. Shrews, 
by the way, were very plentiful, and Loring 
trapped four kinds, two of them new. It 
was always a surprise to me to find these 
tiny shrews swarming in Equatorial Africa 
just as they swarm in Arctic America. 
In a little patch of country not far from 
this camp there were a few sleeping-sickness 
on the opposite bank of the Nile from 
Koba, and were to join us at Nimule. 
It was Kermit’s turn for the next rhino; 
and by good luck it was a bull, giving us a 
complete group of bull, cow, and calf for 
the National Museum. We got it as we had 
gotten our first two. Marching through 
likely country—burnt, this time—we came 
across the tracks of three rhino, two big and 
one small, and followed them through the 
black ashes. It was an intricate and diffi¬ 
cult piece of tracking, for the trail wound 
hither and thither and was criss-crossed by 
others; but Kongoni and Kassitura grad¬ 
ually untangled the maze, found where the 
