190 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
endeavouring to perfect an acquaintance both with the 
big bovines and numerous other co-tenants. 
The buffalo is nowadays (and probably always was, 
more or less) practically nocturnal in habit, both feeding 
and drinking exclusively by night. That, in all my ex¬ 
perience, is his nature, though I am far from dogmatising 
about regions where I have never been and where good 
observers may have recorded a different habit. Twice 
during my first voyage in 1912-13, being on deck before 
dawn, I enjoyed seeing herds by the riverside. Some 
stood drinking, knee-deep; others wallowed in the shallows, 
while in each case stood sentries, watching and warning 
from the dark bank above. 
Leaving their watering-places before it is light, buffaloes, 
throughout the regular “game-country” of White Nile, 
usually wander far inland before lying-up for the day, and 
for their siesta select dense cane-brakes or thorn-thickets. 
These, however, are presumably modern habits induced 
by exigencies of safety rather than the normal inherent 
disposition of the beast. For the buffalo—massive, 
ponderous, and short of limb—is not by choice a traveller. 
This trait is clearly perceptible should one enjoy the 
extreme good fortune to study buffalo, as we did here, 
in regions remote, unharassed by hunters. Here, in the 
simplicity of forests yet undisturbed, the Gamoos rarely 
troubles to travel a league inland—often not a mile— 
and then (this was a surprise to me) eschews thorn- 
thicket and selects for his siesta some little “clearing,” 
bare of grass but where a grove of thickly-growing trees 
affords shade and shelter from the sun above. There were 
many such “stands” in our Hunters’ Eden, and all were so 
selected—or formed? Though for half an acre or so the 
chosen spot was naked of grass, yet immediately around 
grew bush and jungle in plenty. That the buffalo-herds 
habitually, year in and year out, spend somnolent days 
at these selected “stands”—and probably had done so 
for ages—was abundantly evidenced; some of them 
