Part 16 (2/2)

Now the old gentlenified bounds to fall on his face and seize ratitude He rose and capered about, he rushed out and gathered in the slain one by one and laid the-step around the the word ”Bwana! bwana! bwana!” over and over-”Master! entle about like a s forth a flood of his sort of Swahili, of which I could understand only a word here and there Menified and scornful of such perforun He seemed to be able to understand the old fellow's brand of Swahili, and said it over again in a brand I could understand

Froreat sultan, a protector of the poor, and other Arabian Nights titles

The birds proved to be white egrets Now at ho of these creatures, and have so expressedfroe of these villainous rateful weary old savage, I could not fan a spark of regret And froht I like to think that the rest of the flock never came back, but took their toll from the wider fields of the plateau above

Next day we reentered the gaes until many weeks later we came into the country of the Wakaht of the Tana River was from the top of a bluff It flowed below us a hundred feet, bending at a sharp elbow against the cliff on which we stood Out of the jungle it crept sluggishly and into the jungle it crept again, brown, slow, viscid, suggestive of the fevers and the lurking beasts by which, indeed, it was haunted Frole that grew along its banks

At first this was inter thin or even open spaces at intervals, but lower down it extended away unbroken and very tall The trees wereto co hills Those to the left ht ended finally in a low broken range ave one the ih here and there this growth gave space to wide grassy plains Later we discovered that the forest was more apparent than real The sh to perh to allow clear sight for a hundred yards or so Furthermore, the shalloide valleys between the hills were alrass

Thus the course of the Tana possessed advantages to such as we By following in general the course of the stream ere always certain of wood and water The river itself was full of fish-not to speak of hundreds of crocodiles and hippopotaave cover to such animals as the bushbuck, leopard, the beautiful colobus, some of the tiny antelope, waterbuck, buffalo and rhinoceros A the thorn and acacia trees of the hillsides one was certain of irass bottoms were lions, rhinoceroses, a half dozen varieties of buck, and thousands and thousands of garouse On the plains fed zebra, hartebeeste, wart-hog, ostriches, and several species of the sion would be hard to beat

We were now afoot The dreaded tsetse fly abounded here, and we had sent our horses in via Fort Hall F had accompanied theher and less valuablelong at one spot,the country far and near for the special trophies of which we stood in need

It was great fun Generally we hunted each in his own direction and according to his own ideas The jungle along the river, while not the most prolific in trophies, was by all odds theIt was very dense, very hot, and very shady Often a thorn thicket would fling itself froe, absolutely and hopelessly i these then ould slip, bent double, very quietly and gingerly, keeping a sharp lookout for the rightful owners of the trail Again ould wander ah the tops of which the sun flickered on festooned serpent-like vines Every once in a while we h the dense leaf screen on its banks The water looked thick as syrup, of a deadlywith his nose just out of water, or heard the snorting blow of a hippopotaain We stepped very slowly, very alertly, our ears cocked for the faintest sound, our eyes roving

Generally, of course, the creatures of the jungle saw us first We beca or a sca with all our ears for so to the species Thus I ca note of the bushbuck, for exaar that and the beautiful creature, the iets himself As for the rhinoceros, he does not care how much noise he makes, nor how badly he scares you

Personally, I liked very well to circle out in the more open country until about three o'clock, then to enter the river jungle and work my way slowly back toward ca, the birds and ani nether world of shadoe slipped silently frole people fled froazed curiously, or cursed us as their dispositions varied

While thus returning one evening I sawrapidly fro black and white fur shi+ning against the sun I wanted him very much, and promptly let drive at him with the 405 Winchester I always carried this heavier weapon in the dense jungle Of course I missed him, but the roar of the shot so surprised hifield, and I et hih up in the top of a tree Again I aio and fell like a plummet ”Good shot,” said I to myself Fifty feet down the colobus seized a lih the branches as lively as ever In a ood luck I landed hih the body When we retrieved him we found that the first shot had not hit hihtened into falling; but o-all-holds drop is characteristic of the colobus and his oes, leaps out and across as do the ordinaryascents followed by breath-taking straight drops to lower levels When closely pressed froh as he can, and will then conceal himself in the thick leaves

B and I procured our desired nue of this habit-as soon as we had learned it Shooting the beasts with our rifles we soon found to be not only very difficult, but also destructive of the skins On the other hand, anear enough to use a shotgun Therefore we evolved a method productive of the maximum noise, row, barked shi+ns, thorn wounds, tumbles, bruises-and colobus! It was very sile with us, and as soon as we caught sight of a colobus we chased him madly That was all there was to it

And yet this method, simple apparently to the point of iic back of it after all; for after a tiet underneath that colobus when he was at the top of a tree

Then the beast would hide

Consider then a tule as fast as the jungle would let it, slipping, stuling with profane re and shrieking Ahead of us we caught gli up the long slanting li like a plummet into the lower branches of the next tree We white men never could keep up with the best of our h in the open country I could hold theh the thick cover at a great rate of speed far ahead of us After an interval careat shout in chorus By this we knew that the quarry had been definitely brought to a stand Arriving at the spot we craned our heads backward, and proceeded to get a crick in the neck trying to make out invisible colobus in the very tops of the trees above us For gaudily marked beasts the colobus were extraordinarily difficult to see This was in no sense owing to any far-fetched application of protective colouration; but to the re themselves behind apparently the scantiest and most inadequate cover Fortunately for us our boys' ability to see them was equally remarkable Indeed, the aed position, and tried hard to follow directions eagerly proffered by a dozen of the lasses, uess at a s beyond the concealun and send a charge of BB into that bunch Then doould pluht of all the boys Or, as occasionally happened, the shot was followed merely by a shower of leaves and a chorus of expostulations indicating that we had mistaken the place, and had fired into eathered the twelve we required between us At noon we sat under the bank, with the tangled roots of trees above us, and the s by You may be sure ays selected a spot protected by very shoal water, for the crocodiles were nuot a chance, whenever the sound of a shot would not alarame Generally they were to be seen in midstream, just the tip of their snouts above water, and extraordinarily like anything but crocodiles Often it took several close scrutinies through the glass to deter More rarely we ed In this position, too, they were all but undistinguishable as living creatures I think this is perhaps because of their co quite still, are difficult enough to see; but I have a notion that the eye, unknown to itself, catches the sus of the s, even the play of wind and light in the hair of the coat, all of which, while iether relieve the appearance of dead inertia The vitality of a creature like the crocodile, however, see It lies like a log of wood, and for a log of wood it is mistaken

Nevertheless the crocodile has stored in it somewhere a fearful vitality The swiftness of its ; a swirl of water, the sweep of a powerful tail, and the unfortunate victierous to approach the actual edge of any of the great rivers, unless the water is so shallow that the crocodile could not possibly approach under cover, as is its cheerful habit We had considerable difficulty in i this ele wild shrieks from the direction of the river, I rushed down to find the lot huddled together in the very middle of a sand spit that-reached well out into the strea in the shallows they had been surprised by the sudden appearance of an ugly snout and well drenched by the sweep of an eager tail The stroke fortunately missed We stilled the tumult, sat down quietly to wait, and at the end of tenthat croc

Generally we killed the brutes where we found them and allowed them to drift aith the current Occasionally however anted a piece of hide, and then tried to retrieve them One such occasion showed very vividly the tenacity of life and the prireat saurians

I discovered the beast, head out of water, in a reasonable sized pool belohich were shallow rapids My Springfield bullet hit him fair, whereupon he stood square on his head and waved his tail in the air, rolled over three or four ti a while wefour hours later I sneaked up quietly There the crocodile lay sunning himself on the sand bank I supposed he , he immediately commenced to slide off into the water Thereupon I stopped him with a bullet in the spine The first shot had smashed a hole in his head, just behind the eye, about the size of an ordinary coffee cup In spite of this wound, which would have been instantly fatal to any warm-blooded animal, the creature was so little affected that it actually reacted to a slight noise made at some distance from where it lay Of course the wound would probably have been fatal in the long run

The best spot to shoot at, indeed, is not the head but the spine ily powerful They are capable of taking down horses and cattle, with no particular effort This I know froed to see the wonderful sight of the capture and destruction of a full-grown rhinoceros by a crocodile The photographs he took of thisa stream was always a matter of concern to us The boys beat the surface of the water vigorously with their safari sticks On occasion we have even let loose a few heavy bullets to stir up the pool before venturing in