278 
African Game Trails 
heads which seems to completely absorb 
so many hunters who write. What we need 
at the moment is more information about 
the average South African heads. There 
are to be found among most kinds of horn¬ 
bearing animals individuals with horns of 
wholly exceptional size, just as among all 
nations there are individuals of wholly ex¬ 
ceptional height. But a comparison of 
these wholly exceptional horns, although it 
has a certain value, is, scientifically, much 
like a comparison of the giants of different 
nations. A good head is of course better 
than a poor one; and a special effort to 
secure an exceptional head is sportsmanlike 
and proper. But to let the desire for “rec¬ 
ord ” heads, to the exclusion of all else, be¬ 
come a craze, is absurd. The making of 
such a collection is in itself not only proper 
but meritorious; all I object to is the loss 
of all sense of proportion in connection 
therewith. It is just as with philately, or 
heraldry, or collecting the signatures of 
famous men. The study of stamps, or of 
coats of arms, or the collecting, of auto¬ 
graphs, is an entirely legitimate amusement, 
and may be more than a mere amusement; 
it is only when the student or collector al¬ 
lows himself utterly to misestimate the im¬ 
portance of his pursuit that it becomes ridic¬ 
ulous. 
Cuninghame, Grogan, Heller, Kermit, 
and I now went off on a week’s safari in¬ 
land, travelling as light as possible. The 
first day’s march brought us to the kraal of 
a local chief named Sururu. There were a 
few banana trees, and patches of scrawny 
cultivation, round the little cluster of huts, 
ringed with a thorn fence, through which 
led a low door; and the natives owned goats 
and chickens. Sururu himself wore a white 
sheet of cotton as a toga, and he owned a 
red fez and a pair of baggy blue breeches, 
which last he generally carried over his 
shoulder. His people were very scantily 
clad indeed, and a few of them, both men 
and women, wore absolutely nothing ex¬ 
cept a string of blue beads around the waist 
or neck. Their ears had not been pierced 
and stretched like so many East African 
savages, but their lower lips were pierced 
for wooden ornaments and quills. They 
brought us eggs and chickens, which we 
paid for with American cloth; this cloth, 
and some umbrellas, constituting our stock 
of trade goods, or gift goods, for the Nile. 
The following day Sururu himself led us 
to our next camp, only a couple of hours 
away. It was a dry country of harsh grass, 
everywhere covered by a sparse growth of 
euphorbias and stunted thorns, which were 
never in sufficient numbers to make a for¬ 
est, each little, well-nigh leafless tree, stand¬ 
ing a dozen rods or so distant from its near¬ 
est fellow. Most of the grass had been 
burnt, and fires were still raging. Our 
camp was by a beautiful pond, covered with 
white and lilac water-lilies. We pitched 
our two tents on a bluff, under some large 
acacias that cast real shade. It was be¬ 
tween two and three degrees north of the 
equator. The moon, the hot January moon 
of the midtropics, was at the full, and the 
nights were very lovely; the little sheet of 
water glimmered in the moon rays, and 
round about the dry landscape shone with a 
strange, spectral light. 
Near the pond, just before camping, I 
shot a couple of young waterbuck bulls for 
food, and while we were pitching the tents 
a small herd of elephants—cows, young 
bulls, and calves—seemingly disturbed by 
a grass fire which was burning a little way 
off, came up within four hundred yards of 
us. At first we mistook one large cow for a 
bull, and running quickly from bush to 
bush, diagonally to its course, I got within 
sixty yards, and watched it pass at a quick 
shuffling walk, lifting and curling its trunk. 
The blindness of both elephant and rhino 
has never been sufficiently emphasized in 
books. Near camp was the bloody, broken 
skeleton of a young wart-hog boar, killed 
by a lion the previous night. There were 
a number of lions in the neighborhood, and 
they roared at intervals all night long. 
Next morning, after Grogan and I had 
started from camp, when the sun had been 
up an hour, we heard one roar loudly less 
than a mile away. Running toward the 
place we tried to find the lion; but nearby 
a small river ran through beds of reeds, 
and the fires had left many patches of tall, 
yellow, half-burned grass, so that it had 
ample cover, and our search was fruitless. 
Near the pond were green parrots and 
brilliant wood hoopoos, rollers, and sun- 
birds; and buck of the ordinary kinds 
drank at it. A dyker which I shot for the 
table had been feeding on grass tips and on 
the stems and leaves of a small, low-grow¬ 
ing plant. 
