436 
ROOSEVELTS RETURN TO CIVILIZATION 
dashed at him, touching him with its trunk as it passed. The hunter 
saved himself by a quick jump behind a tree. Nearly every day 
dangerous incidents took place, but, fortunately, not a single white 
man in the party was injured throughout the expedition. On the last 
hunt Roosevelt and his son were the only ones in the party who were 
in fit condition to shoot. 
As for the merits of father and son, Mr. Cunninghame thus 
expressed himself: “Bwana Tumbo is a mighty hunter, but if his 
laurels have been imperilled at all on this expedition it has been by 
Kermit, who is one of the deadliest shots and nerviest men, young or 
old, I ever met.” To this praise of the skill and boldness of Kermit 
the others added their tribute. 
At a dinner given the correspondents on the barge, the scene 
lighted by a fire in the papyrus along the stream, the Colonel enter¬ 
tained them with humorous stories of his trip, including the struggles 
of the gun-bearers with English. He talked amusingly of the letters 
which penetrated even to mid-Africa from strangers desiring him to 
send such trifles as a water baby or a 200-pound live snake, tigers’ 
claws for Shriners, all-pink baby elephants, not too old to train or 
too young to bring up. Also of letters of criticism, one man asking 
how he had the heart to kill poor, unoffending rhinoceroses. He 
suggested that probably the writer never had been charged by an 
angry rhinoceros in long grass. 
“Bully!” he ejaculated in response to one remark. He quickly 
stopped. “I mustn’t say ‘bully’ any more,” he remarked. “A distin¬ 
guished critic has said that this word is only used by children and 
ex-Presidents.” 
He entertained a high regard for his guns, and had made an 
interesting collection of the bullets which brought down notable game 
—for instance, the nickel sheathing of the bullet which saved his life 
from a charging elephant and the flattened shell which killed a des¬ 
perate rhinoceros in the nick of time. 
The correspondents, in their turn, had adventurous incidents 
for the ears of the traveler. There had been a sharp race on the 
Nile between the Pasha and the Cairo, two river boats, in the effort 
