THE EAST AFRICAN RAILROAD 
95 
tropic town if he can in any way avoid doing so. Each official keeps 
his private car, not moved by electricity, but pushed by coolies, and 
bearing him from office to house and back again. 
It is such a conveyance of which the hunter avails himself. Leav¬ 
ing the train, he has only to get a trolley car and have himself pushed 
up and down the line. The animals pay no more attention to this than 
to the trains, becoming suspicious only when train or trolley stops. 
The shrewd hunter, therefore, slips off the car while it is in motion, 
and thus may find himself within a few hundred yards of his quarry, 
while the car goes on. His fortune then will depend upon his degree 
of skill with the rifle. 
This is one way of obtaining game. It is not the way in which 
a trained hunter like Colonel Roosevelt would be inclined to indulge 
largely. It looks too much like taking an unfair advantage of the 
animals. There is a second method which proved more to his taste. 
This is to leave the railway and prowl about among the trees and un¬ 
dergrowth of a neighboring river bed. Here in a few minutes one 
may bury oneself in the wildest and savagest kind of forest. The air 
becomes still and hot over the open spaces of dry sand and the pools 
of water. High grass, huge boulders, tangled vegetation, multitudes 
of thorn-bushes obstruct the march, and the ground itself is scarped 
and guttered by the rains into the strangest formations. Around the 
hunter, breast-high, shoulder-high, overhead, rises the African jungle. 
There is a brooding silence, broken now by the voice of a bird, now 
by the scolding bark of a baboon, or by the crunching of one’s own 
feet on the crumbling soil. We enter the haunt of the wild beasts; 
their tracks, the remnants of their repasts, are easily and frequently 
discovered. Here a lion has passed since the morning. There a 
rhinoceros has certainly been within the hour—perhaps within ten 
minutes. We creep and scramble through the game paths, anxiously, 
rifles at full cock, not knowing what each turn or step may reveal. 
The wind, when it blows at all, blows fitfully, now from this quarter, 
now from that; so that one can never be certain that it will not betray 
the intruder in these grim domains to the beast he seeks, or to some 
other, less welcome, before he sees him. At length, after two hours’ 
scramble and scrape, probably without seeing a beast—lion or rhinoc- 
