African Game Trails 
271 
beasts had drunk at a small pool that morn¬ 
ing, and then led us to where they were 
lying asleep under some thorn-trees. It 
was about eleven o’clock. As the bull rose 
Kermit gave him a fatal shot with his be¬ 
loved Winchester. He galloped full speed 
toward us, not charging, but in a mad 
panic of terror and bewilderment; and 
with a bullet from the Holland I brought 
him down in his tracks only a few yards 
away. The cow went off at a gallop. The 
very much bigger than the common pre¬ 
hensile-lipped African rhinoceros, and as 
carrying much longer horns. But the 
square-mouthed rhinos we saw and killed 
in the Lado did not differ from the com¬ 
mon kind in size and horn development 
as much as we had been led to expect; 
although on an average they were un¬ 
doubtedly larger, and with bigger horns, 
yet there was in both respects overlapping, 
the bigger prehensile-lipped rhinos equal- 
calf, a big creature, half grown, hung about 
for some time, and came up quite close, but 
was finally frightened away by shouting 
and hand-clapping. Some cow herons 
were round these rhino; and the head and 
body of the bull looked as if it had been 
splashed with whitewash. 
It was an old bull, with a short, stubby, 
worn-down horn. It was probably no 
heavier than a big ordinary rhino bull such 
as we had shot on the Sotik, and its horns 
were no larger, and the front and rear ones 
were of the same proportions relatively to 
each other. But the misshapen head was 
much larger, and the height seemed greater 
because of the curious hump. This fleshy 
hump is not over the high dorsal vertebrae, 
but just forward of them, on the neck itself, 
and has no connection with the spinal col¬ 
umn. The square-mouthed rhinoceros of 
South Africa is always described as being 
ling or surpassing the smaller individuals of 
the other kind. The huge, square-muzzled 
head, and the hump, gave the Lado rhino 
an utterly different look, however, and its 
habits are also in some important respects 
different. Our gunbearers were all East 
Africans, who had never before been in the 
Lado. They had been very sceptical when 
told that the rhinos were different from 
those they knew, remarking that “all rhinos 
were the same”; and the first sight of the 
spoor merely confirmed them in their be¬ 
lief; but they at once recognized the dung 
as being different; and when the first ani¬ 
mal was down they examined it eagerly 
and proclaimed it as a rhinoceros with a 
hump, like their own native cattle, and with 
the mouth of a hippopotamus. 
On the way to camp, after the death of 
this bull rhino, I shot a waterbuck bull with 
finer horns than any I had yet obtained. 
