648 
AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS 
Stewart Edward White states that on one occasion, near 
the Tana River, he struck a locality where rhinoceros after 
rhinoceros charged quite unprovoked, and he had to shoot 
half a dozen. We have known a rhino charge through a 
camp at night and cause wild panic; they not infrequently 
charge hunters or travellers after dark. 
Personally, we consider the rhinoceros the least danger¬ 
ous of all really dangerous game, although many good hunt¬ 
ers hold the contrary view. The first one any of us saw, a 
bull, charged savagely when mortally wounded at a distance 
of a little over thirty yards, and was killed just thirteen 
yards from the hunter. But we were never really charged 
again. Colonel Roosevelt hit and knocked over one animal 
which we had stalked, as it was galloping toward us at a 
distance of seventy or eighty yards, but we think that this 
rhino was curious rather than enraged, and would not have 
charged home. Kermit was charged by one which he had 
mortally wounded, but it turned upon receiving another 
and much slighter wound. Two or three of our American 
friends who have hunted in East Africa have had narrow 
escapes from rhinos which charged after being wounded, or 
when the effort was made to photograph them. 
Unquestionably, compared to his mild and placid 
square-mouthed kinsman, the hook-lipped rhino is a 
fidgety, restless, irritable, and at times dangerous, crea¬ 
ture. Yet his occasional truculence is more than offset 
by his stupidity and dull eyesight, so far as the actual con¬ 
test with the hunter is concerned. As far as we know but 
one white man has ever been killed while hunting rhinos in 
East Africa (the English official already mentioned was not 
hunting the beast which killed him). This was a German, 
