276 
African Ga'ftie Trails 
with the skin and skeletons. Mearns and 
Loring were busy with birds, small beasts, 
and photographs. So, as we were out of 
fresh meat, I walked away from camp to get 
some, followed by my gunbearers, the little 
mule with its well-meaning and utterly ig¬ 
norant shenzi sais, and a dozen porters. 
We first went along the river brink to 
look for crocodiles. In most places the 
bank was high and steep. Wherever it was 
broken there was a drinking place, with 
leading down to it trails deeply rutted in 
the soil by the herds of giant game that had 
travelled them for untold years. At this 
point the Nile was miles wide, and was 
divided into curving channels which here 
and there spread into lake-like expanses of 
still water. Along the edges of the river 
and between the winding channels and 
lagoons grew vast water-fields of papyrus, 
their sheets and bands of dark green break¬ 
ing the burnished silver of the sunlit waters. 
Beyond the further bank rose steep, sharply 
peaked hills. The tricolored fish eagles, 
striking to the eye because of their snow- 
white heads and breasts, screamed continu¬ 
ally, a wild eerie sound. Cormorants and 
snake birds were perched on trees overhang¬ 
ing the water, and flew away, or plunged 
like stones into the stream, as I approached; 
herons of many kinds rose from the marshy 
edges of the bays and inlets; wattled and 
spur-winged plovers circled overhead; and 
I saw a party of hippopotami in a shallow 
on the other side of the nearest channel, 
their lazy bulks raised above water as they 
basked asleep in the sun. The semi-diurnal 
slate-and-yellow bats flitted from one scan¬ 
tily leaved tree to another, as I disturbed 
them. At the foot of a steep bluff, several 
yards from the water, a crocodile lay. I 
broke its neck with a soft-nosed bullet 
from the little Springfield; for the plated 
skin of a crocodile offers no resistance to a 
modern rifle. We dragged the ugly man- 
eater up the bank, and sent one of the por¬ 
ters back to camp to bring out enough men 
to carry the brute in bodily. It was a fe¬ 
male, containing thirty eggs. We did not 
find any crocodile’s nest; but near camp, 
in digging a hole for the disposal of refuse, 
we came on a clutch of a dozen eggs of the 
monitor lizard. They were in sandy loam, 
two feet and a half beneath the surface, 
without the vestige of a burrow leading to 
them. When exposed to the sun, unlike 
the crocodile’s eggs, they soon burst. Evi¬ 
dently the young are hatched in the cool 
earth and dig their way out. 
We continued our walk and soon came 
on some kob. At two hundred yards I got 
a fine buck, though he went a quarter of a 
mile. Then, at a hundred and fifty yards, 
I dropped a straw-colored Nile hartebeest. 
Sending in the kob and hartebeest used up 
all our porters but two, and I mounted the 
little mule and turned toward camp, having 
been out three hours. Soon Gouvimali 
pointed out a big bustard, marching away 
through the grass a hundred yards off. I 
dismounted, shot him through the base of 
the neck, and remounted. Then Kongoni 
pointed out, some distance ahead, a bush- 
buck ram, of the harnessed kind found in 
this part of the Nile Valley. Hastily dis¬ 
mounting, and stealing rapidly from ant- 
heap to ant-heap, until I was not much over 
a hundred yards from him, I gave him a 
fatal shot; but the bullet was placed a little 
too far back, and he could still go a con¬ 
siderable distance. So far I had been 
shooting well; now, pride had a fall. Im¬ 
mediately after the shot a difficulty arose 
in the rear between the mule and the shenzi 
sais; they parted company, and the mule 
joined the shooting party in front, at a gal¬ 
lop. The bushbuck, which had halted with 
its head down, started off and trotted after 
it, while the mule pursued an uncertain 
course between us; and I don’t know which 
it annoyed most. I emptied my magazine 
twice, and partly a third time, before I 
finally killed the buck and scared the mule 
so that it started for camp. The bushbuck 
in this part of the Nile Valley did not live 
in dense forest, like those of East Africa, 
but among the scattered bushes and aca¬ 
cias. Those that I shot in the Lado had in 
their stomachs leaves, twig tips, and pods; 
one that Kermit shot, a fine buck, had been 
eating grass also. On the Uasin Gishu, in 
addition to leaves and a little grass, they 
had been feeding on the wild olives. 
Our porters were not as a rule by any 
means the equals of those we had in East 
Africa, and we had some trouble because, 
as we did not know their names and faces, 
those who wished to shirk would go off in 
the bushes while their more willing com¬ 
rades would be told off for the needed work. 
So Cuninghame determined to make each 
readily identifiable; and one day I found 
