African Game Trails 
277 
him sitting, in Rhadamanthus mood, at his 
table before his tent, while all the porters 
filed by, each in turn being decorated with 
a tag, conspicuously numbered, which was 
hung round his neck—the tags, by the way, 
being Smithsonian label cards, contributed 
by Dr. Mearns. 
At last Kermit succeeded in getting some 
good white rhino pictures. He was out with 
his gunbearers and Grogan. They had 
hunted steadily for nearly two days without 
seeing a rhino; then Kermit made out a big 
cow with a calf lying under a large tree, on 
a bare plain of short grass. Accompanied 
by Grogan, and by a gunbearer carrying 
his rifle, while he himself carried his “natur¬ 
alist’s graphlex” camera, he got up to with¬ 
in fifty or sixty yards of the dull-witted 
beasts, and spent an hour cautiously ma¬ 
noeuvring and taking photos. He got sev¬ 
eral photos of the cow and calf lying under 
the tree. Then something, probably the 
click of the camera, rendered them uneasy 
and they stood up. Soon the calf lay down 
again, while the cow continued standing 
on the other side of the tree, her head held 
down, the muzzle almost touching the 
ground, according to the custom of this 
species. After taking one or two more pict¬ 
ures Kermit edged in, so as to get better 
ones. Gradually the cow grew alarmed. 
She raised her head, as these animals al¬ 
ways do when interested or excited, twisted 
her tail into a tight knot, and walked out 
from under the tree, followed by the calf; 
she and the calf stood stern to stern for 
a few seconds, and Kermit took another 
photo. By this time the cow had become 
both puzzled and irritated. Even with her 
dim eyes she could make out the men and 
the camera, and once or twice she threat¬ 
ened a charge, but thought better of it. 
Then she began to move off; but suddenly 
wheeled and charged, this time bent on mis¬ 
chief. She came on at a slashing trot, grad¬ 
ually increasing her pace, the huge, square 
lips shaking from side to side. Hoping that 
she would turn Kermit shouted loudly and 
waited before firing until she was only 
ten yards off. Then, with the Winchester, 
he put a bullet in between her neck and 
shoulder, a mortal wound. She halted and 
half wheeled, and Grogan gave her right 
and left, Kermit putting in a couple of ad¬ 
ditional bullets as she went off. A couple 
of hundred yards away she fell, rose again, 
staggered, fell again, and died. The calf, 
which was old enough to shift for itself, re¬ 
fused to leave the body, although Kermit 
and Grogan pelted it with sticks and clods. 
Finally a shot through the flesh of the but¬ 
tocks sent it off in frantic haste. Kermit 
had only killed the cow because it was abso¬ 
lutely necessary in order to avoid an acci¬ 
dent, and he was sorry for the necessity; 
but I was not, for it was a very fine speci¬ 
men, with the front horn thirty-one inches 
long; being longer than any other we had 
gotten. The second horn was compressed 
laterally, exactly as with many black rhi¬ 
nos (although it is sometimes stated that 
this does not occur in the case of the white 
rhino). We preserved the head-skin and 
skull, for the National Museum. 
The flesh of this rhino, especially the 
hump, proved excellent. It is a singular 
thing that scientific writers seem almost to 
have overlooked, and never lay any stress 
upon, the existence of this neck hump. It 
is on the neck, forward of the long dorsal 
vertebra, and is very conspicuous in the 
living animal; and I am inclined to think 
that some inches of the exceptional height 
measurements attributed to South African 
white rhinos may be due to measuring to 
the top of this hump. I am also puzzled by 
what seems to be the great inferiority in 
horn development of these square-mouthed 
rhinos of the Lado to the square-mouthed 
or white rhinos of South Africa (and, by 
the way, I may mention that on the whole 
these Lado rhinos certainly looked lighter 
colored, when we came across them stand¬ 
ing in the open, than did their prehensile¬ 
lipped East African brethren). We saw 
between thirty and forty square-mouthed 
rhinos in the Lado, and Kermit’s cow had 
much the longest horn of any of them; and 
while they averaged much better horns than 
the black rhinos we had seen in East Africa, 
between one and two hundred in number, 
there were any number of exceptions on 
both sides. There are recorded measure¬ 
ments of white rhino horns from South 
Africa double as long as our longest from 
the Lado. Now this is, scientifically, a fact 
of some importance, but it is of no conse¬ 
quence whatever when compared with the 
question as to what, if any, the difference is 
between the average horns; and this last 
fact is very difficult to ascertain, largely be¬ 
cause of the foolish obsession for “record” 
