158 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
reeds. However, we always picked him up again, and at 
length, after a suspense that had seemed eternal, marked 
him into a patch of green flags half a mile away. That 
patch was merely one amidst hundreds all precisely 
similar ; so I spent ten minutes in taking exact “ bearings ” 
and identification-marks—even to counting the bulrush- 
heads in that crucial clump. Then off we set, and more 
than an hour we spent in suffocating heat, plunging and 
wallowing through quagmire and morass. Then, when 
200 yards from the well-recognised marks, we sighted, 
standing on the very fringe of the guiding flags, the 
vision of our half-lost trophy—what a beauty! By aid 
of friendly clumps of canes I crept in to 100 yards, 
when a clean shoulder-shot dropped him, stone-dead, 
where he stood. 
We were not long in reaching the spot and then, while 
feasting enraptured eyes on the prostrate prize-—surely 
one of the rarest in the whole gamut of the hunter ?■—we 
were startled by a deep-drawn groan, evidently from a 
dying beast, close alongside. Within the fringing flags 
and certainly not two yards away, lay the animal first fired 
at. The one I had just now unwittingly killed was' the 
second of the pair ; in short, I had shot them both. Note 
that the licence allows but one. 
Now during the whole of this long-protracted pursuit, I 
had never (since shortly after firing the original shot at his 
pal) set eyes on this second buck at all Then, when last 
seen, he, with his harem, was holding away northward, 
and I presumed that all had cleared right out of the 
country. So undoubtedly they had, for I saw It myself. 
Yet on second thoughts, and actuated obviously by pure 
sympathy, this devoted animal had changed his mind 
and returned to safeguard his stricken friend. Thus had 
he met his death, standing actually alongside. I did not 
then, nor do I now, feel that reproach can attach to me ; 
since to anticipate what had actually occurred passes the 
scope of human diagnosis. 
