IN AFRICA

One Morning’s Bag

IN AFRICA

Hunting Adventures in the
Big Game Country

BY

JOHN T. McCUTCHEON

Cartoonist of the Chicago Tribune

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND CARTOONS
BY THE AUTHOR

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.

TO THOSE ADVENTUROUS SOULS WHO
RESENT THE RESTRAINT OF THE BEATEN PATH
THESE OBSERVATIONS OF AN AMATEUR
ARE DEDICATED

PREFATORY NOTE

CHAPTER ONE
The Preparation for Departure. Experiences with Willing Friends
and Advisers

CHAPTER TWO
The First Half of the Voyage. From Naples to the Red Sea, with
a Few Side-Lights on Indian Ocean Travel

CHAPTER THREE
The Island of Mombasa, with the Jungles of Equatorial Africa
“Only a Few Blocks Away.” A Story of the World’s Champion
Man-Eating Lions

CHAPTER FOUR
On the Edge of the Athi Plains, Face to Face with Herds of Wild
Game. Up in a Balloon at Nairobi

CHAPTER FIVE
Into the Heart of the Big Game Country with a Retinue of More
Than One Hundred Natives. A Safari and What It Is

CHAPTER SIX
A Lion Drive. With a Rhino in Range Some One Shouts “Simba” and
I Get My First Glimpse of a Wild Lion. Three Shots and Out

CHAPTER SEVEN
On the Tana River, the Home of the Rhino. The Timid are
Frightened, the Dangerous Killed, and Others Photographed.
Moving Pictures of a Rhino Charge

CHAPTER EIGHT
Meeting Colonel Roosevelt in the Uttermost Outpost of
Semi-Civilization. He Talks of Many Things, Hears that he has
Been Reported Dead, and Promptly Plans an Elephant Hunt

CHAPTER NINE
The Colonel Reads Macaulay’s “Essays,” Discourses on Many
Subjects with Great Frankness, Declines a Drink of Scotch
Whisky, and Kills Three Elephants

CHAPTER TEN
Elephant Hunting Not an Occasion for Lightsome Merrymaking.
Five Hundred Thousand Acres of Forest in Which the Kenia
Elephant Lives, Wanders and Brings Up His Children

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nine Days Without Seeing an Elephant. The Roosevelt Party
Departs and We March for the Mountains on Our Big Elephant
Hunt. The Policeman of the Plains

CHAPTER TWELVE
“Twas the Day Before Christmas.” Photographing a Charging
Elephant, Cornering a Wounded Elephant in a River Jungle
Growth. A Thrilling Charge. Hassan’s Courage

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the Swamps of the Guas Ngishu. Beating for Lions We Came
Upon a Strange and Fascinating Wild Beast, Which Became
Attached to Our Party. The Little Wanderobo Dog

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Who’s Who in Jungleland. The Hartebeest and the Wildebeest, the
Amusing Giraffe and the Ubiquitous Zebra, the Lovely Gazelle
and the Gentle Impalla

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Some Natural History in Which it is Revealed that a Sing-Sing
Waterbuck is Not a Singing Topi, and that a Topi is Not a
Species of Head-dress

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the Tall Grass of the Mount Elgon Country. A Narrow Escape
from a Long-Horned Rhino. A Thanksgiving Dinner and a Visit to
a Native Village

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Up and Down the Mountain Side from the Ketosh Village to the
Great Cave of Bats. A Dramatic Episode with the Finding of a
Black Baby as a Climax

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Electric Lights, Motor-Cars and Fifteen Varieties of Wild Game.
Chasing Lions Across the Country in a Carriage

CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Last Word in Lion Hunting. Methods of Trailing, Ensnaring
and Otherwise Outwitting the King of Beasts. A Chapter of
Adventures

CHAPTER TWENTY
Abdullah the Cook and Some Interesting Gastronomic Experiences.
Thirteen Tribes Represented in the Safari. Abdi’s Story of His
Uncle and the Lions

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Back Home from Africa. Ninety Days on the Way Through India,
Java, China, Manila and Japan. Three Chow Dogs and a Final
Series of Amusing Adventures

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ways and Means. What to Take and What Not to Take. Information
for Those that Wish, Intend or Hope to Hunt in the African
Highlands

IN AFRICA

CHAPTER I

THE PREPARATION FOR DEPARTURE. EXPERIENCES WITH WILLING
FRIENDS AND ADVISERS

Ever since I can remember, almost, I
have cherished a modest ambition to hunt lions and elephants.
At an early age, or, to be more exact, at about that age which
finds most boys wondering whether they would rather be Indian
fighters or sailors, I ran across a copy of Stanley’s
Through the Dark Continent. It was full of fascinating
adventures. I thrilled at the accounts which spoke in terms of
easy familiarity of “express” rifles and “elephant” guns, and
in my vivid but misguided imagination, I pictured an elephant
gun as a sort of cannon—a huge, unwieldy arquebus—that fired
a ponderous shell. The old woodcuts of daring hunters and
charging lions inspired me with unrest and longing—the longing
to bid the farm farewell and start down the road for Africa.
Africa! What a picture it conjured up in my fancy! Then, as
even now, it symbolized a world of adventurous possibilities;
and in my boyhood fancy, it lay away off
there—somewhere—vaguely—beyond mountains and deserts and
oceans, a vast, mysterious, unknown land, that swarmed with
inviting dangers and alluring romance.

One by one my other youthful ambitions have been laid away.
I have given up hope of ever being an Indian fighter out on the
plains, because the pesky redskins have long since ceased to
need my strong right arm to quell them. I also have yielded up
my ambition to be a sailor, or rather, that branch of the
profession in which I hoped to specialize—piracy—because, for
some regretful reason, piracy has lost much of its charm in
these days of great liners. There is no treasure to search for
any more, and the golden age of the splendid clipper ships,
with their immense spread of canvas, has given way to the
unromantic age of the grimy steamer, about which there is so
little to appeal to the imagination. Consequently, lion hunting
is about the only thing left—except wars, and they are few and
far between.

And so, after suffering this “lion-hunting” ambition to lie
fallow for many years, I at last reached a day when it seemed
possible to realize it. The chance came in a curiously
unexpected way. Mr. Akeley, a man famed in African hunting
exploits, was to deliver a talk before a little club to which I
belonged. I went, and as a result of my thrilled interest in
every word he said, I met him and talked with him and finally
was asked to join a new African expedition that he had in
prospect. With the party were to be Mrs. Akeley, with a record
of fourteen months in the big game country, and Mr. Stephenson,
a hunter with many years of experience in the wild places of
the United States, Canada and Mexico. My hunting experience had
been chiefly gained in my library, but for some strange reason,
it did not seem incongruous that I should begin my real hunting
in a lion and elephant country.

Getting Ready for Lion Shooting

I had all the prowess of a Tartarin, and during the five
months that elapsed before I actually set forth, I went about
my daily work with a mind half dazed with the delicious
consciousness that I was soon to become a lion hunter. I feared
that modern methods might have taken away much of the old-time
romance of the sport, but I felt certain that there was still
to be something left in the way of excitement and
adventure.

The succeeding pages of this book contain the chronicle of
the nine delightful months that followed my departure from
America.

In the middle of August Mr. Stephenson and I arrived in
London. Mr. Akeley had ordered most of our equipment by letter,
but there still remained many things to be done, and for a week
or more we were busy from morning till night.

It is amazing how much stuff is required to outfit a party
of four people for an African shooting expedition of several
months’ duration. First in importance come the rifles, then the
tents and camp equipment, then the clothes and boots, then the
medical supplies, and finally the food. Perhaps the food might
be put first in importance, but just now, after a hearty
dinner, it seems to be the least important detail.

Many men outfitting for an African campaign among wild
animals secure their outfits in London. It is there, in modest
little shops, that one gets the weapons that are known to
sportsmen from one end of the world to the other—weapons
designed expressly for the requirements of African shooting,
and which have long stood the test of hard, practical service.
For two days we haunted these famous gun-makers’ shops, and for
two days I made a magnificent attempt to look learnedly at
things about which I knew little.

Practising in the Museum

At last, after many hours of gun shopping, attended by the
constant click of a taxicab meter, I assembled such an imposing
arsenal that I was nervous whenever I thought about it. With
such a battery it was a foregone conclusion that something, or
somebody, was likely to get hurt. I hoped that it would be
something, and not somebody.

The old-time “elephant gun” which shot an enormous ball and
a staggering charge of black powder has given way to the modern
double-barreled rifle, with its steel bullet and cordite
powder. It is not half so heavy or clumsy as the old timers,
but its power and penetration are tremendous. The largest of
this modern type is the .650 cordite—that is, it shoots a
bullet six hundred and fifty thousandths of an inch in
diameter, and has a frightful recoil. This weapon is
prohibitive on account of its recoil, and few, if any,
sportsmen now care to carry one. The most popular type is the
.450 and .475 cordite double-barreled ejector, hammerless
rifles, and these are the ones that every elephant hunter
should have.

We started out with the definite purpose of getting three
.450s—one for Mr. Akeley, one for Mr. Stephenson, and one for
myself; also three nine-millimeter (.375) Mannlichers and two
.256 Mannlichers. What we really got were three .475 cordites,
two nine-millimeter Mannlichers, one eight-millimeter Mauser,
and two .256 Mannlichers. We were switched off the .450s
because a government regulation forbids the use of that caliber
in Uganda, although it is permitted in British East Africa, and
so we played safe by getting the .475s. This rifle is a heavy
gun that carries a bullet large enough to jolt a fixed star and
recoil enough to put one’s starboard shoulder in the hospital
for a day or so. Theoretically, the sportsman uses this weapon
in close quarters, and with a bullet placed according to expert
advice sees the charging lion, rhino or elephant turn a back
somersault on his way to kingdom come. It has a tremendous
impact and will usually stop an animal even if the bullet does
not kill it. The bullets of a smaller rifle may kill the
animal, but not stop it at once. An elephant or lion, with a
small bullet in its heart, may still charge for fifty or one
hundred yards before it falls. Hence the necessity for a rifle
that will shock as well as penetrate.

Advice from a Cheerful Stranger

Several experienced African lion hunters strongly advise
taking a “paradox,” which in their parlance is affectionately
called a “cripple-stopper.” It looks like what one would
suppose an elephant gun to look like. Its weight is staggering,
and it shoots a solid ball, backed up by a fearful charge of
cordite. They use it under the following conditions: Suppose
that a big animal has been wounded and not instantly killed. It
at once assumes the aggressive, and is savage beyond belief.
The pain of the wound infuriates it and its one object in life
is to get at the man who shot it. It charges in a well-nigh
irresistible rush, and no ordinary bullet can stop it unless
placed in one or two small vital spots. Under the circumstances
the hunter may not be able to hold his rifle steady enough to
hit these aforesaid spots. That is when the paradox comes in.
The hunter points it in a general way in the direction of the
oncoming beast, pulls the trigger and hopes for the best. The
paradox bullet hits with the force of a sledge hammer, and
stuns everything within a quarter of a mile, and the hunter
turns several back somersaults from the recoil and fades into
bruised unconsciousness.

We decided not to get the paradox, preferring to trust to
hitting the small vital spots rather than transport the weapon
by hand through long tropical marches.

The nine-millimeter rifles were said to be large enough for
nearly all purposes, but not reassuring in extremely close
quarters. The .256 Mannlichers are splendid for long range
shooting, as they carry a small bore bullet and have enormous
penetrating power.

The presumption, therefore, was that we should first shoot
the lion at long range with the .256, then at a shorter range
with the nine-millimeter, then at close range with the .475
cordite, and then perhaps fervently wish that we had the
paradox or a balloon.

After getting our arsenal, we then had to get the
cartridges, all done up in tin boxes of a weight not exceeding
sixty pounds, that being the limit of weight which the African
porter is expected to carry. There were several thousand rounds
of ammunition, but this did not mean that several thousand
lions were to be killed. Allowing for a fair percentage of
misses, we calculated, if lucky, to get one or two lions.

After getting our rifles and ammunition under satisfactory
headway, we then saw that our seventy-two “chop” boxes of food
were sure to be ready in time to catch our steamer at
Southampton.

And yet these preliminary details did not half conclude our
shopping preliminaries in London. There were camping rugs,
blankets, cork mattresses, pillows and pillow cases, bed bags,
towels, lanterns, mosquito boots, whetstones, hunting and
skinning knives, khaki helmets, pocket tapes to measure
trophies, Pasteur anti-venomous serum, hypodermic syringes,
chairs, tables, cots, puttees, sweaters, raincoats, Jaeger
flannels, socks and pajamas, cholera belts, Burberry hunting
clothes, and lots of other little odds and ends that seemed to
be necessary.

The clothes were put up in air-proof tin uniform cases,
small enough to be easily carried by a porter and secure enough
to keep out the millions of ants that were expected to seek
habitation in them.

Part of the Equipment

Most of our equipment, especially the food supplies, had
been ordered by letter, and these we found to be practically
ready. The remaining necessities, guns, ammunition, camera
supplies, medical supplies, clothes, helmets, and so on, we
assembled after two days of prodigious hustling. There was
nothing then to be done except to hope that all our mountainous
mass of equipment would be safely installed on the steamer for
Mombasa. This steamer, the Adolph Woermann, sailed
from Hamburg on the fourteenth of August, was due at
Southampton on the eighteenth and at Naples on the thirtieth.
To avoid transporting the hundred cases of supplies overland to
Naples, it was necessary to get them to Southampton on the
eighteenth. It was a close shave, for only by sending them down
by passenger train on that morning were they able to reach
Southampton. Fortunately our hopes were fulfilled, and at last
we received word that they were on board and were careening
down toward Naples, where we expected to join them on the
thirtieth.

After disposing of this important preliminary, we then had
time to visit the zoo at South Kensington and the British
museum of natural history, where we carefully studied many of
the animals that we hoped to meet later under less formal
conditions. We picked out the vital spots, as seen from all
angles, and nothing then remained to be done but to get down to
British East Africa with our rifles and see whether we could
hit those vital spots.

Studying the Lion’s Vital Spots

Mr. Akeley had an elaborate moving picture machine and we
planned to get some excellent pictures of charging animals. The
lion, rhino or other subject was to be allowed to charge within
a few feet of the camera and then with a crack of our trusty
rifles he was supposed to stop. We seemed safe in assuming,
even without exaggeration, that this would be exciting.

It was at least that.

At last we said farewell to London, a one-sided ceremony,
stopped at Rheims to see the aviators, joined the Akeleys at
Paris, and after touching a few of the high spots in Europe,
arrived in Naples in ample time to catch our boat for
Mombasa.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST HALF OF THE VOYAGE. FROM NAPLES TO THE RED SEA,
WITH A FEW SIDE LIGHTS ON INDIAN OCEAN TRAVEL

Lion hunting had not been fraught
with any great hardships or dangers up to this time. The
Mediterranean was as smooth as a mill-pond, the Suez Canal was
free from any tempestuous rolling, and the Red Sea was placid
and hot. After some days we were in the Indian Ocean, plowing
lazily along and counting the hours until we reached Mombasa.
Perhaps after that the life of a lion hunter would be less
tranquil and calm.

The Adolph Woermann was a
six-thousand-three-hundred-ton ship, three years old, and so
heavily laden with guns and ammunition and steel rails for the
Tanga Railway that it would hardly roll in a hurricane. There
were about sixty first-class passengers on board and a fair
number in the second class. These passengers represented a
dozen or so different nationalities, and were bound for all
sorts of places in East, Central, and South Africa. Some were
government officials going out to their stations, some were
army officers, some were professional hunters, and some were
private hunters going out “for” to shoot.

There were also a number of women on board and some
children. I don’t know how many children there were, but in the
early morning there seemed to be a great number.

These Indian Ocean steamers are usually filled with an
interesting lot of passengers. At first you may only speculate
as to who and what they are and whither they are bound, but as
the days go by you get acquainted with many of them and find
out who nearly everybody is and all about him. On this steamer
there were several interesting people. First in station and
importance was Sir Percy Girouard, the newly appointed governor
of British East Africa, who was going out to Nairobi to take
his position. Sir Percy is a splendid type of man, only about
forty-two years old, but with a career that has been filled
with brilliant achievements. He was born in Canada and was
knighted in 1900. He looks as Colonel Roosevelt looked ten
years ago, and, in spite of a firm, definite personality of
great strength, is also courteous and kindly. He has recently
been the governor of northern Nigeria, and before that time
served in South Africa and the Soudan. It was of him that Lord
Kitchener said “the Soudan Railway would never have been built
without his services.”

The new governor was accompanied by two staff officers, one
a Scotchman and the other an Irishman, and both of them with
the clean, healthy look of the young British army officer.
There would be a big reception at Mombasa, no doubt, with bands
a-playing and fireworks popping, when the ship arrived with the
new executive.

“Crossing the Line” Ceremonies

Mr. Stephenson, Mr. and Mrs. Akeley and Mr. McCutcheon.
Courtesy of Boyce Balloonagraph Expedition

There were also several officials with high-sounding titles
who were going out to their stations in German East Africa.
These gentlemen were mostly accompanied by wives and babies and
between them they imparted a spirited scene of domesticity to
the life on shipboard. The effect of a man wheeling a baby
carriage about the deck was to make one think of some peaceful
place far from the deck of a steamer.

Before and After Outfitting

Little Tim was the life of the ship. He was a little boy
aged eighteen months, who began life at Sombra, in Nyassaland,
British Central Africa. Just now he was returning from England
with his father and mother. Little Tim had curly hair, looked
something like a brownie, and was brimming over with energy and
curiosity every moment that he was awake. If left alone five
minutes he was quite likely to try to climb up the rigging.
Consequently he was never left alone, and the decks were
constantly echoing with a fond mother’s voice begging him not
to “do that,” or to “come right here, Tim.” One of Tim’s chief
diversions was to divest himself of all but his two nearest
articles of wear and sit in the scuppers with the water turned
on. A crowd of passengers was usually grouped around him and
watched his manœuvers with intense interest. He was
probably photographed a hundred times and envied by everybody
on board. It was so fearfully hot in the Red Sea that to be
seated in running water with almost no clothes on seemed about
the nicest possible way to pass the time.

Little Tim

There was a professional elephant hunter on board. He was a
quiet, reserved sort of man, pleasant, and not at all
bloodthirsty in appearance. He had spent twenty years shooting
in Africa, and had killed three hundred elephants. On his last
trip, during which he spent nearly four years in the Congo, he
secured about two and one-half tons of ivory. This great
quantity of tusks, worth nearly five dollars a pound, brought
him over twenty thousand dollars, after paying ten per cent. to
the Congo government. The Belgians place no limit upon the
number of elephants one may shoot, just so they get their
rake-off. In British territory, however, sportsmen are limited
to only two elephants a year to those holding licenses to
shoot. Our elephant hunter friend was now on his way back to
shoot some more.

The Elephant Hunter and His Bag

There was another interesting character on board who caused
many of us to stop and think. He was a young British army
officer who was mauled by a lioness several months ago in
Somaliland. He now walked with a decided limp and was likely to
lose his commission in the army because of physical
infirmities. He was cheerful, pleasant, and looked hopefully
forward to a time when he could have another go at a lion. This
is the way the thing happened: Last March he was shooting in
Somaliland and ran across a lioness. He shot her, but failed to
disable her. She immediately charged, chewed up his leg, arm
and shoulder, and was then killed by his Somali gunbearer. He
was days from any help. He dressed his own wounds and the
natives tried to carry him to the nearest settlement. Finally
his bandages were exhausted, the natives deserted, and it was
only after frightful suffering that he reached help. In three
weeks blood poisoning set in, as is usual after the foul teeth
of a lion have entered the flesh, and for several months he was
close to death. Now he was up and about, cheerful and sunny,
but a serious object lesson to the lion hunters bound for the
lair of the lion.

Having Fun with Mr. Woermann

In the smoking-room of the Adolph Woermann was a
bronze bust of Mr. Woermann presented by himself. Whether he
meant to perpetuate his own memory is not vital to the story.
The amusing feature lies in the fact that some irreverent
passenger, whose soul was dead to the sacredness of art, put a
rough slouch hat on Mr. Woermann one night, with side-splitting
results. Mr. W. is a man with a strong, intelligent German
face, something like that of Prince Henry, and in the statue
appears with bare neck and shoulders. The addition of a rakish
slouch hat produced a startling effect, greatly detracting from
the strictly artistic, but adding much to the interest of the
bust. It looked very much as though he had been ashore at Aden
and had come back on board feeling the way a man does when he
wants his hat on the side of his head. Still, what can a
shipowner expect who puts a nude bust of himself in his own
ship?

An African Hair-Cut

The ship’s barber was the Associated Press of the ship’s
company, and his shop was the Park Row of the vessel. He had
plenty of things to talk about and more than enough words to
express them. Every vague rumor that floated about was sure to
find lodgment in the barber shop, just as a piece of driftwood
finally reaches the beach. He knew all the secrets of the
voyage and told them freely.

One day I went down to have my hair trimmed. He asked if I’d
have it done African style. “How’s that?” I inquired. “Shaved,”
said he, and “No,” said I. A number of the Germans on board
were adopting the African style of hair-cut, and the effect was
something depressing. Every bump that had lain dormant under a
mat of hair at once assumed startling proportions, and red ears
that were retiring suddenly stuck out from the pale white scalp
like immense flappers. A devotee of this school of tonsorial
art had a peeled look that did not commend him to favorable
mention in artistic circles. But the flies, they loved it, so
it was an ill wind that blew no good.

The Red Sea has a well-earned reputation of being hot. We
expected a certain amount of sultriness, but not in such lavish
prodigality as it was delivered. The first day out from Suez
found the passengers peeling off unnecessary clothes, and the
next day found the men sleeping out on deck. There wasn’t much
sleeping. The band concert lasted until ten-thirty, then the
three Germans who were trying to drink all the beer on board
gave a nightly saengerfest that lasted until one o’clock, and
then the men who wash down the decks appeared at four. Between
one and four it was too hot to sleep, so that there wasn’t much
restful repose on the ship until we got out of the Red Sea.

We Slept on Deck in the Red Sea

Down at the end of the Red Sea are the straits of
Bab-el-Mandeb. In the middle of the straits is the island of
Perim, a sun-baked, bare and uninviting chunk of land that has
great strategic value and little else. It absolutely commands
the entrance to the Red Sea, and, naturally, is British. Nearly
all strategic points in the East are British, from Gibraltar to
Singapore. A lighthouse, a signal station, and a small
detachment of troops are the sole points of interest in Perim,
and as one rides past one breathes a fervent prayer of
thanksgiving that he is not one of the summer colony on
Perim.

They tell a funny story about an English officer who was
sent to Perim to command the detachment. At the end of six
months an official order was sent for his transfer, because no
one is expected to last longer than six months without going
crazy or committing suicide. To the great surprise of the war
office a letter came back stating that the officer was quite
contented at Perim, that he liked the peace and quiet of the
place, and begged that he be given leave to remain another six
months. The war office was amazed, and it gladly gave him the
extension. At the end of a year the same exchange of letters
occurred and again he was given the extension.

I don’t know how long this continued, but in the end the war
office discovered that the officer had been in London having a
good time while a sergeant-major attended to the sending of the
biannual letter. I suppose the officer divided his pay with the
sergeant-major. If he did not he was a most ungrateful man.

The Adolph Woermann is a German ship and is one of
the best ones that go down the east coast. Its passengers go to
the British ports in British East Africa, to the German ports
in German East Africa, and to several other ports in South
Africa. Consequently the passengers are about equally divided
between the English and the Germans, with an occasional
Portuguese bound for Delagoa Bay or Mozambique.

When we first went aboard our party of four desired to
secure a table by ourselves. We were unsuccessful, however, and
found it shared by a peaceful old gentleman with whiskers. By
crossing with gold the palm of the chief steward, the old
gentleman was shifted to a seat on the first officer’s right.
Later we discovered that he was Sir Thomas Scanlon, the first
premier of South Africa, the man who gave Cecil Rhodes his
start.

Mauled by a Lion

There were many interesting elements which made the cruise
of the Woermann unusual. Mr. Boyce and his party of
six were on board and were on their way to photograph East
Africa. They took moving pictures of the various deck sports,
also a bird’s-eye picture of the ship, taken from a camera
suspended by a number of box kites, and also gave two evenings
of cinematograph entertainment.

There were also poker games, bridge games, and other forms
of seaside sports, all of which contributed to the gaiety of
life in the Indian Ocean. In the evening one might have
imagined oneself at a London music-hall, in the daytime at the
Olympian games, and in the early morning out on the farm. There
were a number of chickens on board and each rooster seemed
obliged to salute the dawn with a fanfare of crowing. They
belonged to the governor and were going out to East Africa to
found a colony of chickens. Some day, years hence, the proud
descendents of these chickens will boast that their ancestors
came over on the Woermann, just as some people boast
about their ancestors on the Mayflower.

When we crossed the equator, a committee of strong-arm men
baptized those of the passengers who had never before crossed
the line. Those who had crossed the line entered into the fun
of the occasion with much spirit and enthusiasm.

On the hottest day of the trip, just as we left Suez, when
the mercury was sputtering from the heat, we heard that the
north pole had been discovered. It cooled us off considerably
for a while.

CHAPTER III

THE ISLAND OF MOMBASA, WITH THE JUNGLES OF EQUATORIAL
AFRICA “ONLY A FEW BLOCKS AWAY.” A STORY OF THE WORLD’S
CHAMPION MAN-EATING LIONS

In this voyage of the
Woermann there were about twenty Englishmen and thirty
Germans in the first class, not including women, and children.
There was practically no communication between the two
nationalities, which seemed deeply significant in these days
when there is so much talk of war between England and Germany.
Each went his way without so much as a “good morning” or a
guten abend. And it was not a case of unfamiliarity
with the languages, either, that caused this mutual restraint,
for most of the Germans speak English. It was simply an
evidence that at the present time there is decidedly bad
feeling between the two races, and if it is a correct barometer
of conditions in Europe, there is certain to be war one of
these days. On the Woermann, we only hoped that it
would not break out while the weather was as hot as it was at
that time.

The Germans are not addicted to deck sports while voyaging
about, and it is quite unusual to find on German ships anything
in the way of deck competition. The German, while resting,
prefers to play cards, or sing, or sit in his long easy chair
with the children playing about. The Englishman likes to
compete in feats of strength and takes to deck sports as a duck
takes to water. I don’t know who started it, but some one
organized deck sports on the Woermann, and after we
left Aden the sound of battle raged without cessation. Some of
the competitions were amusing. For instance, there was the
cockfight. Two men, with hands and knees hobbled with a stick
and stout rope, seat themselves inside a circle, and the game
is for each one to try to put the other outside the circle.
Neither can use his hands.

The Cock Fight

It is like wrestling in a sitting position with both hands
tied, the mode of attack being to topple over one’s opponent
and then bunt him out of the circle. There is considerable
skill in the game and a fearful lot of hard work. By the time
the victor has won, the seat of the trousers of each of the two
contending heroes has cleaned the deck until it shines—the
deck, not the trousers.

“Are You There?“

In a similar way the deck is benefited by the “are you
there” game. Two men are blindfolded, armed with long paper
clubs, and then lie at full length on the deck, with left hands
clasped. One then says, “Are you there?” and when the other
answers, “I am,” he makes a wild swat at where he thinks the
other’s head to be. Of course, when the man says “I am,” he
immediately gets his head as far away from where it was when he
spoke as is possible while clasping his opponent’s hand. The
“Are you there” man makes a wild swing and lands some place
with a prodigious thump. He usually strikes the deck and seldom
hits the head of the other man. If one of them hits the other’s
head three times he wins.In the meantime the deck has been thoroughly massaged by the
two recumbent heroes as they have moved back and forth in their
various offensive and defensive manœuvers.

A Study in Mombasa Shadows

Mombasa Is a Pretty Place

Transportation in Mombasa

The Spar and Pillow Fight

The pillow fight on the spar is the most fun. Two gladiators
armed with pillows sit astride a spar and try to knock each
other off. It requires a good deal of knack to keep your
balance while some one is pounding you with a large pillow. You
are not allowed to touch the spar with your hands, hence the
difficulty of holding a difficult position. When a man begins
to waver the other redoubles his attack, and slowly at first,
but surely, the defeated gladiator tumbles off the spar into a
canvas stretched several feet below. It is lots of fun,
especially for the spectator and the winner.

Then, of course, there were other feats of intellectual and
physical prowess in the Woermann competition, such as
threading the needle, where you run across the deck, thread a
needle held by a woman, and then drag her back to the starting
point. The woman usually, in the excitement of the last
spirited rush, falls over and is bodily dragged several yards,
squealing wildly and waving a couple of much agitated deck
shoes, and so forth.

Similar to this contest is the one where the gentleman
dashes across the deck with several other equally dashing
gentlemen, kneels at the feet of a woman who ties his necktie
and then lights his cigarette. The game is to see who can do
this the quickest and get back to the starting place first. If
you have ever tried to light a cigarette in a terrible hurry
and on a windy deck, you will appreciate the elements of
uncertainty in the game.

These deck sports served to amuse and divert during the six
days on the Indian Ocean, and then the ship’s chart said that
we were almost at Mombasa. The theoretical stage of the lion
hunt was nearly over and it was now a matter of only a few days
until we should be up against the “real thing.” I sometimes
wondered how I should act with a hostile lion in front of
me—whether I would become panic-stricken or whether my nerve
would hold true. There is lots of food for reverie when one is
going against big game for the first time.

Chalking the Pig’s Eye

We landed at Mombasa September sixteenth, seventeen days out
from Naples.

Mombasa is a little island about two by three miles in
extent. It is riotous with brilliant vegetation, and, as seen
after a long sea voyage through the Red Sea and the Indian
Ocean, it looks heavenly except for the heat. Hundreds of great
baobab trees with huge, bottle-like trunks and hundreds of
broad spreading mango trees give an effect of tropical
luxuriance that is hardly to be excelled in beauty anywhere in
the East. Large ships that stop at the island usually wind
their course through a narrow channel and land their passengers
and freight at the dock at Kilindini, a mile and a half from
the old Portuguese town of Mombasa, where all the life of the
island is centered. There are many relics of the old days
around the town of Mombasa and the port of Kilindini, but since
the British have been in possession a brisk air of progress and
enterprise is evident everywhere. Young men and young women in
tennis flannels, and other typical symptoms of British
occupation are constantly seen, and one entirely forgets that
one is several thousand miles from home and only a few blocks
from the jungles of equatorial Africa. We dreaded Mombasa
before we arrived, but were soon agreeably disappointed to find
it not only beautiful and interesting, but also pleasantly cool
and full of most hospitable social life.

When our ship anchored off Kilindini there was a great crowd
assembled on the pier. There were many smart looking boats,
manned with uniformed natives, that at once came out to the
ship, and we knew that the town was en fête to
welcome the newly appointed governor, Sir Percy Girouard.

He and his staff landed in full uniform. There were
addresses of welcome at the pier, a great deal of cheering and
considerable photographing. Then the rest of the passengers
went ashore and spent several hours at the custom house. All
personal luggage was passed through, and we embarked on a
little train for Mombasa. The next day we registered our
firearms and had Smith, Mackenzie and Company do the rest. This
firm is ubiquitous in Mombasa and Zanzibar. They attend to
everything for you, and relieve you from much worry, vexation
and rupees. They pay your customs duties, get your mountains of
stuff on the train for Nairobi, and all you have to do is to
pay them a commission and look pleasant. The customs duty is
ten per cent. on everything you have, and the commission is
five per cent. But in a hot climate, where one is apt to feel
lazy, the price is cheap.

Thanks to the governor, our party of four was invited to go
to Nairobi on his special train. It left Mombasa on the morning
of the nineteenth of September, and at once began to climb
toward the plateau on which Nairobi is situated, three hundred
and twenty-seven miles away. We had dreaded the railway ride
through the lowlands along the coast, for that district has a
bad reputation for fever and all such ills. But again we were
pleasantly disappointed. The country was beautiful and
interesting, and at four o’clock in the afternoon we arrived at
Voi, a spot that is synonymous with human ailments. It is one
of the famous ill health resorts of Africa, but on this
occasion it was on its good behavior. We stopped four hours,
inspected everything in sight, and at eight o’clock the special
began to climb toward the plateau of East Africa. At nine
o’clock we stopped at Tsavo, a place made famous by the two
man-eating lions whose terrible depredations have been so
vividly described by Colonel Patterson in his book, The Man
Eaters of Tsavo. These two lions absolutely stopped all
work on the railroad for a period of several weeks. They were
daring beyond belief, and seemed to have no fear of human
beings. For a time all efforts to kill them were in vain.
Twenty-eight native workmen were eaten by them, and doubtless
many more were unrecorded victims of their activity. The whole
country was terrorized until finally, after many futile
attempts, they were at last killed.

No book on Africa seems complete unless this incident is
mentioned somewhere within its pages.

We looked out at Tsavo with devouring interest. All was
still, with the dead silence of a tropical night. Then the
train steamed on and we had several hours in a berth to think
the matter over. In the early hours of morning, we stopped at
Simba, the “Place of Lions,” where the station-master has many
lion scares even now. In the cold darkness of the night we
bundled up in thick clothes and went forward to sit on the
observation seat of the engine. Slowly the eastern skies became
gray, then pink, and finally day broke through heavy masses of
clouds. It was intensely cold. In the faint light we could see
shadowy figures of animals creeping home after their night’s
hunting. A huge cheetah bounded along the track in front of us.
A troop of giraffes slowly ambled away from the track. A gaunt
hyena loped off into the scrub near the side of the railroad
and then, as daylight became brighter, we found ourselves in
the midst of thousands of wild animals. Zebras, hartebeests,
Grant’s gazelles, Thompson’s gazelles, impalla, giraffes,
wildebeests, and many other antelope species cantered off and
stood to watch the train as it swept past them. It was a
wonderful ride, perhaps the most novel railway ride to be found
any place in the world. On each side of the Uganda Railroad
there is a strip of land, narrow on the north and wide on the
south, in which game is protected from the sportsman, and
consequently the animals have learned to regard these strips as
sanctuary. There were many tales of lions as we rode along, and
the imagination pictured a slinking lion in every patch of
reeds along the way. I heard one lion story that makes the
man-eaters of Tsavo seem like vegetarians. It was told to me by
a gentleman high in the government service—a man of
unimpeachable veracity. He says the story is absolutely true,
but refused to swear to it.

Once upon a time, so the story goes, there was a caravan of
slaves moving through the jungles of Africa. The slave-drivers
were cruel and they chained the poor savages together in
bunches of ten. Each slave wore an iron ring around his neck
and the chain passed through this ring and on to the rest of
the ten. For days and weeks and months they marched along,
their chains clanking and their shoulders bending beneath the
heavy weight. From time to time the slave-drivers would jog
them along with a few lashes from a four-cornered “hippo” hide
kiboko, or whip. Quite naturally the life was far from
pleasant to the chain-gang and they watched eagerly for a
chance to escape. Finally one dark night, when the sentinels
were asleep, a bunch of ten succeeded in creeping away into the
darkness. They were unarmed and chained from neck to neck, one
to another. For several days they made their way steadily
toward the coast. All seemed well. They ate fruit and nuts and
herbs and began to see visions of a pleasant arrival at the
coast.

They Made Their Way Steadily Toward the Coast

But, alas! Their hopes were soon to be dispelled. One night
a deep rumbling roar was heard in the jungle through which they
were picking their unanimous way. A shudder ran through the
slaves. “Simba,” they whispered in terror. A little
while later there was another rumble, this time much closer.
They speedily became more frightened. Here they were, ten days’
march from the coast, unarmed, and quite defenseless against a
lion.

Presently the lion appeared, his cruel, hungry eyes gleaming
through the night. They were frozen with horror, as slowly,
slowly, slowly the great animal crept toward them with his tail
sibilantly lashing above his back. They were now thoroughly
alarmed and realized to the utmost that the lion’s intentions
were open to grave suspicion. Breathlessly they waited, or
perhaps they tried to climb trees, but being chained together
they could not climb more than one tree. And there was not a
single tree big enough to hold more than nine of them. The
record of the story is now obscure, but the horrid tale goes on
to relate that the lion gave a frightful roar and leaped upon
the tenth man, biting him to death in a single snap. The
dilemma of the others is obvious. They knew better than to
disturb a lion while it is eating. To do so would be to court
sudden death. So they sat still and watched the beast slowly
and greedily devour their comrade. Having finished his meal the
great beast, surfeited with food, slowly moved off into the
jungle.

The Lion’s Intentions Were Open to Grave
Suspicions

Immediately the nine remaining slaves took to their heels,
dragging the empty ring and chain of the late number ten. All
night long they ran until finally they became exhausted and
fell asleep. In the afternoon they again resumed their march,
hopeful once more. But alas! again.

Along about supper-time they heard the distant roar of a
lion. Presently it sounded nearer and soon the gleaming eyes of
the lion appeared once more among the jungle grass. Once again
they were frozen with horror as the hungry beast devoured the
last man in the row—number nine. Again they sat helpless while
the man-eater slowly finished his supper, and again they were
overjoyed to see him depart from their midst. As soon as the
last vestige of his tail had disappeared from view they
scrambled up and hiked briskly toward the coast, nine days
away.

While the Man-Eater Finished His Supper

They were now thoroughly alarmed, and almost dreaded the
supper hour. The next night the lion caught up with them again
and proceeded to devour number eight. He then peacefully ambled
away, leaving another empty ring.

The next night there was a spirited contest to see which end
of the chain should be last, but a vote was taken and it was
decided six to one in favor of continuing in their original
formation. The one who voted against was eaten that night and
the remaining six, with the four empty rings clanking behind
them, resumed their mournful march to the coast, six days
away.

Two to One

For five nights after this, the lion caught up with them and
diminished their number by five. Finally there was only one
left and the coast was a full day’s march away. Could he make
it? It looked like a desperate chance, but he still had hopes.
He noticed with pleasure that the lion was becoming fat and
probably could not travel fast. But he also noticed with
displeasure that he had forty feet of chain and nine heavy iron
neck rings to lug along and that extra weight naturally greatly
handicapped him. It was a thrilling race—the coast only one
day away and life or death the prize! Who can imagine the
feelings of the poor slave? But with a stout heart he struggled
on through poisonous morasses, and pushed his way through snaky
creepers. The afternoon sun slowly sank toward the western
horizon and—

The locomotive at this point of the story screeched loudly.
The wheels grated on the track and my official friend leaped
off the cow-catcher.

“Here!” I shouted, “what’s the finish of that story?”

“I’ll tell you the rest the next time I see you,” he sang
out, and so I don’t know just how the story ended.

CHAPTER IV

ON THE EDGE OF THE ATHI PLAINS, FACE TO FACE WITH GREAT
HERDS OF WILD GAME. UP IN A BALLOON AT NAIROBI

Before Colonel Roosevelt drew the
eyes of the world on British East Africa Nairobi was
practically unheard of. The British colonial office knew where
it was and a fair number of English sportsmen had visited it in
the last six or eight years. Perhaps twenty-five or thirty
Americans had been in Nairobi on their way to the rich game
fields that lie in all directions from the town, but beyond
these few outsiders the place was unknown. Now it is decidedly
on the map, thanks to our gallant and picturesque Theodore. It
has been mentioned in book and magazine to a degree that nearly
everybody can tell in a general way where and what it is, even
if he can not pronounce it.

Before coming to Nairobi I had read a lot about it, and yet
when I reached the place it seemed as though the descriptions
had failed to prepare me for what I saw. We arrived under
unusual conditions. Files of native soldiers were lined up on
the platform of the station to welcome the new governor, and
the whole white population of the town, several hundred in
number, were massed in front of the building. The roofs and
trees were filled with natives and the broad open space beyond
the station was fringed with pony carts, bullock carts,
rickshaws, cameras, and some hotel ‘buses. Several thousand
people, mostly East Indians and natives, were among those
present. Lord Delamere, who has adopted East Africa as his
home, and who owns a hundred thousand acres or so of game
preserves, read an address of welcome, and Sir Percy, in white
uniform and helmet, responded with a speech that struck a
popular note. There were dozens of cameras snapping and the
whole effect was distinctly festive in appearance.

In the Back Yard of Nairobi

The town lies on the edge of the Athi Plains, a broad sweep
of sun-bleached grass veldt many miles in extent. From almost
any part of the town one may look out on plains where great
herds of wild game are constantly in sight. In an hour’s
leisurely walk from the station a man with a gun can get
hartebeest, zebra, Grant’s gazelle, Thompson’s gazelle,
impalla, and probably wildebeest. One can not possibly count
the number of animals that feed contentedly within sight of the
town of Nairobi, and it is difficult to think that one is not
looking out upon a collection of domesticated game. Sometimes,
as happened two nights before we reached Nairobi, a lion will
chase a herd of zebra and the latter in fright will tear
through the town, destroying gardens and fences and flowers in
a mad stampede. We met one man who goes out ten minutes from
town every other day and kills a kongoni (hartebeest) as food
for his dogs. If you were disposed to do so you could kill
dozens every day with little effort and almost no diminution of
the visible supply.

Dressed to Kill

The Balloon Ascension

The Norfolk Hotel, Nairobi

Nairobi is new and unattractive. There is one long main
thoroughfare, quite wide and fringed with trees, along which at
wide intervals are the substantial looking stone building of
the Bank of India, the business houses, the hotels, and numbers
of cheap corrugated iron, one-story shacks used for government
purposes. A native barracks with low iron houses and some more
little iron houses used for medical experiments and still some
more for use as native hospitals are encountered as one takes
the half-mile ride from the station to the hotel. A big square
filled with large trees marks the park, and a number of rather
pretentious one-story buildings display signs that tell you
where you may buy almost anything, from a suit of clothes to a
magazine rifle.

The Main Street Is a Busy Place

Goanese, East Indian, and European shops are scattered at
intervals along this one long, wide street. Rickshaws,
pedestrians, bullock carts, horsemen, and heavily burdened
porters are passing constantly back and forth, almost always in
the middle of the street. Bicycles, one or two motorcycles, and
a couple of automobiles are occasionally to be seen. The aspect
of the town suggests the activity of a new frontier place where
everybody is busy. At one end the long street loses itself in
the broad Athi Plains, at the other it climbs up over some low
hills and enters the residence district on higher ground. Here
the hills are generously covered with a straggly growth of
tall, ungraceful trees, among which, almost hidden from view,
are the widely scattered bungalows of the white population.

An Embo Apollo

The Askari Patrols the Camp

Branching off from the main street are side streets, some of
them thronged with East Indian bazaars, about which may be
found all the phases of life of an Indian city. Still beyond
and parallel with the one main street are sparsely settled
streets which look ragged with their tin shacks and scattered
gardens.

Nairobi is not a beautiful place, but it is new and busy,
and the people who live there are working wonders in changing a
bad location into what some day will be a pretty place. It is
over five thousand feet high, healthy, and cold at night. Away
off in the hills a mile or more from town is Government House,
where the governor lives, and near by is the club and a new
European hospital, looking out over a sweep of country that on
clear days includes Kilima-Njaro, over a hundred miles to the
southeast, and Mount Kenia, a hundred miles northeast.

You are still in civilization in Nairobi. Anything you want
you may buy at some of the shops, and almost anything you may
want to eat or drink may easily be had. There are weekly
newspapers, churches, clubs, hotels, and nearly all the
by-products of civilization. One could live in Nairobi, only a
few miles from the equator, wear summer clothes at noon and
winter clothes at night, keep well, and not miss many of the
luxuries of life. The telegraph puts you in immediate touch
with the whole wide world, and on the thirtieth of September
you can read the Chicago Tribune of August
thirty-first.

At present the chief revenue of the government is derived
from shooting parties, and the officials are doing all they can
to encourage the coming of sportsmen. Each man who comes to
shoot must pay two hundred and fifty dollars for his license as
well as employ at least thirty natives for his transport. He
must buy supplies, pay ten per cent. import and export tax, and
in many other ways spend money which goes toward paying the
expenses of government. The government also is encouraging
various agricultural and stock raising experiments, but these
have not yet passed the experimental stage. Almost anything may
be grown in British East Africa, but before agriculture can be
made to pay the vast herds of wild game must either be
exterminated or driven away. No fence will keep out a herd of
zebra, and in one rush a field of grain is ruined by these
giant herds. Experiments have failed satisfactorily to
domesticate the zebra, and so he remains a menace to
agriculture and a nuisance in all respects except as adding a
picturesque note to the landscape.

Colonel Roosevelt, in a recent speech in Nairobi, spoke of
British East Africa as a land of enormous possibilities and
promise, but in talks with many men here I found that little
money has been made by those who have gone into agriculture in
a large way. Drought and predatory herds of game have
introduced an element of uncertainty which has made
agriculture, as at present developed, unsatisfactory.

Colonel Roosevelt has become a popular idol in East Africa.
Everywhere one meets Englishmen who express the greatest
admiration for him. He has shrewdly analyzed conditions as they
now exist and has picked out the weak spots in the government.
For many years prior to the arrival of Sir Percy Girouard the
country has been administered by weak executives, and its
progress has been greatly retarded thereby. The last governor
was kind, but inefficient, and some months ago was sent to the
West Indies, where he is officially buried. Roosevelt came,
sized up the situation, and made a speech at a big banquet in
Nairobi. Nearly two hundred white men in evening clothes were
there. They came from all parts of East Africa, and listened
with admiration to the plain truths that Theodore Roosevelt
told them in the manner of a Dutch uncle. Since then he has
owned the country and could be elected to any office within the
gift of the people. He talked for over an hour, and it must
have been a great speech, if one may judge by the enthusiastic
comments I have heard about it. When an Englishman gets
enthusiastic about a speech by an American it must be a pretty
good speech.

Newland and Tarlton is the firm that outfits most shooting
parties that start out from Nairobi. They do all the
preliminary work and relieve you of most of the worry. If you
wish them to do so, they will get your complete outfit, so you
need not bring anything with you but a suitcase. They will get
your guns, your tents, your food supplies, your mules, your
head-man, your cook, your gunbearers, your askaris (native
soldiers), your interpreter, your ammunition, and your porters.
They will have the whole outfit ready for you by the time you
arrive in Nairobi. When you arrive in British East Africa,
a-shooting bent, you will hear of Newland and Tarlton so often
that you will think they own the country.

Mr. Newland met us in Mombasa, and through his agents sent
all of our London equipment of tents and guns and ammunition
and food up to Nairobi. When we arrived in Nairobi he had our
porters ready, together with tent boys, gunbearers, and all the
other members of our safari, and in three days we were
ready to march. The firm has systematized methods so much that
it is simple for them to do what would be matters of endless
worry to the stranger. In course of time you pay the price, and
in our case it seemed reasonable, when one considers the work
and worry involved. Most English sportsmen come out in October
and November, after which time the shooting is at its height.
Two years ago there were sixty safaris, or shooting
expeditions, sent out from Nairobi. When we left, late in
September, there were about thirty.

The Great White Way in Nairobi

The Busiest Place in Nairobi

Umbrella Acacias

The New Governor Looks Something Like
Roosevelt

Each party must have from thirty to a couple of hundred camp
attendants, depending upon the number of white men in the
party. Each white man, requires, roughly, thirty natives to
take care of him. In our party of four white people we had one
hundred and eighteen. One would presume that the game would
speedily be exterminated, yet it is said that the game is
constantly increasing. After one day’s ride on the railway it
would be hard to conceive of game being more plentiful than it
was while we were there. Mr. Roosevelt carried nearly three
hundred men with him, collected a great quantity of game, and
necessarily spent a great deal of money. It is said that the
expenses of his expedition approached ten thousand dollars a
month, but the chances are that this figure is much more than
the actual figure.

At the time of our arrival there was a shortage in the
porter supply, and we were obliged to take out men from a
number of different tribes. Swahili porters are considered the
best, but there are not enough to go round, so we had to take
Swahilis, Bagandas, Kikuyus, Kavirondos, Lumbwas, Minyamwezis,
and a lot more of assorted races. Each porter carries sixty
pounds on his head, and when the whole outfit is on the trail
it looks like a procession of much importance.

The Norfolk Hotel is the chief rendezvous of Nairobi. In the
course of the afternoon nearly all the white men on hunting
bent show up at the hotel and patronize the bar. They come in
wonderful hunting regalia and in all the wonderful splendor of
the Britisher when he is afield. There is nearly always a great
coming and going of men riding up, and of rickshaws arriving
and departing. Usually several tired sportsmen are stretched
out on the veranda of the long one-storied building, reading
the ancient London papers that are lying about. Professional
guides, arrayed in picturesque Buffalo Bill outfits, with spurs
and hunting-knives and slouch hats, are among those present,
and amateur sportsmen in crisp khaki and sun helmets and new
puttees swagger back and forth to the bar. There is no denying
the fact that there is considerable drinking in Nairobi. There
was as much before we got there as there was after we got
there, however. After the arrival of the European steamer at
Mombasa business is brisk for several days as the different
parties sally forth for the wilds.

At the Norfolk Hotel Bar

On our ship there were four different parties. A young
American from Boston, who has been spending several years doing
archæological work in Crete, accompanied by a young
English cavalry officer, were starting out for a six-weeks’
shoot south of the railway and near Victoria Nyanza.

Two professional ivory hunters were starting for German East
Africa by way of the lake. Mr. Boyce and his African
balloonograph party of seven white men were preparing for the
photographing expedition in the Sotik, and our party of four
was making final preparations for our march. Consequently there
was much hurrying about, and Newland and Tarlton’s warehouse
was the center of throngs of waiting porters and the scene of
intense activity as each party sorted and assembled its
mountains of supplies.

Seager and Wormald got off first, going by train to Kijabe,
where they were to begin their ten days’ march in the Sotik.
Here they were to try their luck for two or three weeks and
then march back, preparatory to starting home.

The professional ivory hunters were slow in starting. There
was delay in getting mules. One of them had shot three hundred
elephants in the Belgian Congo during the last four years, and
it was suspected he had been poaching. The other had been
caught by the Belgian authorities on his last trip, lost all
his ivory and guns by confiscation, but was ready to make
another try. The ivory game is a rich one and there are always
venturesome men who are willing to take chances with the law in
getting the prizes.

The Boyce party with its two balloons and its great number
of box kites and its moving picture equipment and its
twenty-nine cameras and its vast equipment was slow in
starting, but it expected to get away on September
twenty-fourth, the day after we left. They planned to fill
their balloon in Nairobi and tow it at the end of a special
train as far as Kijabe, where they were to strike inland from
the railway. They were encamped on a hill overlooking the city,
with their two hundred and thirty porters ready for the field
and their balloon ready to make the first ascension ever
attempted in East Africa.

Throngs of natives squatted about, watching the final
preparations, and doubtless wondered what the strange, swaying
object was. On the evening of the twenty-second the party gave
a moving picture show at one of the clubs for the benefit of
St. Andrew’s church. A great crowd of fashionably dressed
people turned out and saw the motion picture records of events
which they had seen in life only a couple of days before. There
were moving pictures of the arrival of the governor’s special
train, his march through the city, and many other events that
were fresh in the minds of the audience. There were also motion
pictures taken on the ship that brought us down from Naples to
Mombasa, and it was most interesting to see our fellow
passengers and friends reproduced before us in their various
athletic activities while on shipboard. Mr. Boyce gave an
afternoon show for children, an evening show for grown-ups, and
was to give another for the natives the following night. The
charities of Nairobi were much richer because of Mr. Boyce and
his African Balloonograph Expedition.

While in Nairobi we visited the little station where
experiments are being made in the “sleeping sickness.” An
intelligent young English doctor is conducting the
investigations and great hopes are entertained of much new
information about that most mysterious ailment that has swept
whole colonies of blacks away in the last few years.

In many little bottles were specimens of the deadly tsetse
fly that causes all the infection. And the most deadly of all
was the small one whose distinguishing characteristic was its
wings, which crossed over its back. These we were told to look
out for and to avoid them, if possible. They occur only in
certain districts and live in the deep shade, near water. They
also are day-biting insects, who do their biting only between
eleven o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the
afternoon.

In the station there were a number of monkeys, upon which
the fly was being tried. They were in various stages of the
disease, but it seemed impossible to tell whether their illness
was due to the sleeping sickness germ or was due to tick fever,
a common malady among monkeys. In one of the rooms of the
laboratory there were natives holding little cages of tsetse
flies against the monkeys, which were pinioned to the floor by
the natives. The screened cages were held close to the stomach
of the helpless monkey, and little apertures in the screen
permitted the fly to settle upon and bite the animal.

There are certain wide belts of land in Africa called the
“tsetse fly belts,” where horses, mules and cattle can not
live. These districts have been known for a number of years,
long before the sleeping sickness became known. In the case of
animals, the danger could be minimized by keeping the animals
out of those belts, but in the case of humans the same can not
be done. One infected native from a sleeping sickness district
can carry the disease from one end of the country to the other,
and when once it breaks out the newly infected district is
doomed. Consequently the British authorities are greatly
alarmed, for by means of this deadly fly the whole population
of East Africa might be wiped out if no remedy is discovered.
It has not yet been absolutely proven that East Africa is a
“white man’s country,” and in the end it may be necessary for
him to give up hope of making it more than a place of temporary
residence and exploration.

We were also shown some ticks. They are the pests of Africa.
They exist nearly every place and carry a particularly
malicious germ that gives one “tick fever.” It is not a deadly
fever, but it is recurrent and weakening. There are all kinds
of ticks, from little red ones no bigger than a grain of pepper
to big fat ones the size of a finger-nail, that are exactly the
color of the ground. They seem to have immortal life, for they
can exist for a long time without food. Doctor Ward told us of
some that he had put in a box, where they lived four years
without food or water. He also told us of one that was sent to
the British museum, put on a card with a pin through it, and
lived over two years in this condition. It is assumed, however,
that it sustained fatal injuries, because after a two years’
fight against its wound it finally succumbed.

We were told to avoid old camping grounds while on
safari, because these spots were usually much infested
with ticks waiting for new camping parties. Wild game is always
covered with ticks and carries them all over the land. As you
walk through the grass in the game country the ticks cling to
your clothes and immediately seek for an opening where they may
establish closer relations with you. Some animals, like the
rhino and the eland, have tick birds that sit upon their backs
and eat the ticks. The egrets police the eland and capture all
predatory ticks, while the rhino usually has half a dozen
little tick birds sitting upon him.

However, we were starting out in a day or so, and in a few
days expected to learn a lot more about ticks than we then
knew.

It is supposed to require a certain amount of nerve to go
lion shooting. It is also supposed to require an additional
amount to face an angry rhino or to attempt to get African
buffalo. The last-named creature is a vindictive, crafty beast
that is feared by old African hunters more than they fear any
other animal. In consequence of these dangers we decided that
it might be well to give our nerves a thorough test before
going out with them. If they were not in good condition it
would be well to know of it before rather than after going up
against a strange and hostile lion.

That is why we went up in the balloon in Nairobi. The
balloon was one of the two Boyce balloons and had never been
tried. It was small, of twelve thousand cubic feet capacity, as
compared with the seventy thousand foot balloons that do the
racing. It was also being tried at an altitude of over five
thousand feet under uncertain wind and heat conditions, and so
the element of uncertainty was aggravated. We felt that if we
could go up in a new balloon of a small size it might
demonstrate whether we should later go up a tree or stand pat
against a charging menagerie.

There was a great crowd gathered on the hill where this
balloon was being inflated. Since five o’clock in the morning
the gas had been generating in the wooden tanks, and from these
was being conducted by a cloth tube to the mouth of the
balloon. The natives squatted wonderingly about in a circle,
mystified and excited. At three o’clock the balloon was over
half filled and was swaying savagely at its anchorage. A strong
wind was blowing, and Mr. Lawrence, who had charge of the
ascension, was apprehensive. He feared to fill the balloon to
its capacity lest the expansion of the gas due to the hot sun
should explode it.

At half past three the basket was attached and it looked
small—about the size of a large bushel basket, three feet in
diameter and three feet deep. The balloon, heavily laden with
sand-bags, was lightened until it could almost rise, and in
this condition was led across to an open spot sufficiently far
from the nearest trees. The crowd thronged up pop-eyed and
quivering with excitement. Then there was a long wait until the
wind had died down a bit, which it did after a while. The
eventful moment had arrived, and Mr. Stephenson, of our party,
climbed into the basket. He is only six feet five inches in
height and weighs only two hundred and thirty pounds. He had on
a pair of heavy hunting boots, for we were leaving for the
hunting grounds immediately after the ascension. One by one the
restraining bags of sand were taken off, but still the balloon
sat on the ground without any inclination to do otherwise.

A wave of disappointment spread over the crowd. Suddenly a
brilliant inspiration struck the gallant aëronaut. He took
off one of his heavy hunting boots and cast it overboard. The
balloon arose a foot or two and then sagged back to earth. Then
the other boot was cast over and the balloon rose several feet,
swaying and whipping savagely over the heads of the crowd. The
wind was now blowing pretty hard, and when the wire was run out
the balloon started almost horizontally for the nearest tree,
rising slightly.

Throwing Out Ballast

The wire was stopped at once and the balloon thus suddenly
restrained, changed its horizontal course to an upward one. At
about sixty feet up the wire was again paid out and the balloon
made a dash for the trees again. Once more the balloon was
stopped and rose to a height of one hundred and fifty feet,
where it swayed about with the pleasant face of Stephenson
looking over the edge of the basket. He had to sit down, as
there was not room to stand. The ascension seemed a failure
with the handicap of two hundred and thirty pounds, and so the
balloon was reeled down to the earth again. It was not a great
ascension, but the amateur aëronaut had gained the
distinction of making the first balloon ascension ever made in
East Africa. He would have gone higher if his shoes had been
heavier.

To me fell the next chance, and I knew that my one hundred
and forty pounds would not seriously handicap the balloon. Once
more there was a long wait until the wind died down, and all of
a sudden the cylinder of wire was released and the ground sank
hundreds of feet below me. The horizon widened and the whole
vast plain of the African highlands stretched out with an
ever-widening horizon. New mountain peaks rose far away and
native villages with ant-like people moving about appeared in
unexpected quarters. Away below, the crowd of people looked
like little insects as they gazed up at the balloon. Grasping
the ropes that led from the basket to the balloon, I stood and
waved at them and could hear the shouts come up from a thousand
feet below.

I was not frightened. There was no sensation of motion as
long as the balloon was ascending. Aside from looking at the
wonderful scene that opened out before me, I believe I thought
chiefly about where I should land in case the wire broke. The
balloon would undoubtedly go many miles before descending, and
five miles in any direction would lead me into a primitive
jungle or veldt. A hundred miles would take me into almost
unexplored districts in some directions, where the natives
would greet me as some supernatural being. Perhaps I might be
greeted as a god and—just in the midst of these reflections
they began to reel in the balloon. The sudden stopping was not
pleasant, for then the balloon began to sway. Slowly the earth
came nearer and the wind howled through the rigging and the
partly filled bag flapped and thundered. The wire, about as
thick as a piano wire, looked frail, but at last after a slow
and tedious descent a safe landing was made amid the wondering
natives. Cameras clicked and the moving picture machine worked
busily as the balloon was secured to earth again.

To Mrs. Akeley of our party fell the next chance to go up.
As she was lifted into the basket the feminine population of
Nairobi gazed in wonder that a woman should dare venture up in
a balloon. The cameras clicked some more, somebody shook hands
with her, and it began to look quite like a leave-taking. Just
when all was ready the wind sprang up savagely and an ascension
seemed inexpedient. There was a long wait and still the wind
continued in gusts. At last it was determined that we might as
well settle down for better conditions, so Mrs. Akeley was
lifted out and we waited impatiently for the wind to die
down.

At last it died down, all was hurriedly prepared for the
ascension, and Mrs. Akeley took her place again in the basket.
In an instant the balloon shot up a couple of hundred feet and
was held there for a moment. The wind once more sprang up and
the balloon was drawn down amid the cheers of the crowd. She
had been the first woman to make an ascension in British East
Africa, if not in all of Africa.

We then mounted our mules and rode out on the open plains.
Several hours before, our entire camp had moved and we were to
join them at a prearranged spot out on the Athi Plains. All our
preliminary worries were over and at last we were actually
started. At six o’clock, far across the country we saw the
gleaming lights of our camp-fires and the green tents that were
to be our homes for many weeks to come. Enormous herds of
hartebeest and wildebeest were on each side, and countless
zebras. That night two of us heard the first bark of the zebra,
and we thought it must be the bark of distant dogs. It was one
of our first surprises to learn that zebras bark instead of
neigh.

CHAPTER V

INTO THE HEART OF THE BIG GAME COUNTRY WITH A RETINUE OF
MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED NATIVES. A SAFARI AND WHAT IT IS

When I first expressed my intention
of going to East Africa to shoot big game some of my friends
remarked, in surprise: “Why, I didn’t know that you were so
bloodthirsty!” They seemed to think that the primary object of
such an expedition was to slay animals, none of which had done
anything to me, and that to wish to embark in any such project
was an evidence of bloodthirstiness. I tried to explain that I
had no particular grudge against any of the African fauna, and
that the thing I chiefly desired to do was to get out in the
open, far from the picture post-card, and enjoy experiences
which could not help being wonderful and strange and perhaps
exciting.

The shooting of animals merely for the sake of killing them
is, of course, not an elevating sport, but the by-products of
big game hunting in Africa are among the most delightful and
inspiring of all experiences. For weeks or months you live a
nomadic tent life amid surroundings so different from what you
are accustomed to that one is both mentally and physically
rejuvenated. You are among strange and savage people, in
strange and savage lands, and always threatened by strange and
savage animals. The life is new and the scenery new. There is
adventure and novelty in every day of such a life, and it is
that phase of it that has the most insistent appeal. It is the
call of the wild to which the pre-Adamite monkey in our nature
responds.

Even if one never used his rifle one would still enjoy life
on safari. Safari is an Arabic word meaning
expedition as it is understood in that country. If you go on
any sort of a trip you are on safari. It need not be a
shooting trip.

Of course everybody who has read the magazines of the last
year has been more or less familiarized with African hunting.
He has read of the amount of game that the authors have killed
and of the narrow escapes that they have had.

He also has read about expeditions into districts with
strange names, but naturally these names have meant nothing to
him. I know that I read reams of African stuff about big game
shooting and about safari, yet in spite of all that, I
remained in the dark as to many details of such a life. I
wanted to know what kind of money or trade stuff the hunter
carried; what sort of things he had to eat each day; what he
wore, and how he got from place to place. Most writers have a
way of saying: “We equipped our safari in Nairobi and
made seven marches to such and such a place, where we ran into
some excellent eland.” All the important small details are thus
left out, and the reader remains in ignorance of what the tent
boy does, who skins the game that is killed, and what sort of a
cook stove they use.

The purpose of this chapter is to tell something about the
little things that happen on safari. First of all, at
the risk of repeating what has been written so often before, I
will say a few words about the personnel of a safari,
such as the one I was with.

There were four white people in our expedition—Mr. and Mrs.
Akeley, Mr. Stephenson, and myself. Mr. Akeley’s chief object
was to get a group of five elephants for the American Museum of
Natural History and incidentally secure photographic and moving
picture records of animal life. Both he and Mrs. Akeley had
been in Africa before and knew the country as thoroughly
perhaps as any who has ever been there. Mr. Akeley undoubtedly
is the foremost taxidermist of the world, and his work is
famous wherever African animal life has been studied. Mr.
Stephenson went for the experience in African shooting, and I
for that experience and any other sort that might turn up.

To supply an expedition of four white people, we had one
head-man, whose duty it was to run the safari—that
is, to get us where we wanted to go. The success and pleasure
of the safari depends almost wholly upon the head-man.
If he is weak, the discipline of the camp will disappear and
all sorts of annoyances will steadily increase. If he is
strong, everything will run smoothly.

The Cook—A Toto—The Head-Man

Our head-man was a young Somali, named Abdi. For several
years he was with Mr. McMillan of Juja farm, and he spoke
English well and knew the requirements of white men. He was
strikingly handsome, efficient, and ruled the native porters
firmly and kindly. Each day we patted ourselves on the back
because of Abdi.

It Is Tropical Along the Athi River

Hippos in the Tana River

Our Camp Down on the Tana

Second in the list came our four gunbearers, all Somalis,
they being considered the best gunbearers. The duty of the
gunbearer is always to be with you when you are hunting, to
carry your gun, and to have it in your hand the instant it is
needed. Then there were four second gunbearers, who came along
just behind the first gunbearers. The second men were, in our
case, selected from the native porters, and were subject to the
orders of the first gunbearer. The first gunbearer carries your
field-glasses and your light, long-range rifle; the second
gunbearer carries your camera, your water bottle, and your
heavy cordite double-barreled rifle. In close quarters, as in a
lion fight, the first gunbearer crouches at your elbow, hands
the big rifle to you; you fire, and he immediately takes the
rifle and places in your hands the other rifle, ready for
firing. By the time you have fired this one the first is again
ready, and in this way you always have a loaded rifle ready for
use. There frequently is no time for turning around, and so the
first gunbearer is at your elbow with the barrel of one rifle
pressed against your right leg that you may know that he is
there. Sometimes they run away, but the Somali gunbearers are
the most fearless and trustworthy, and seldom desert in time of
need. The gunbearer has instructions never to fire unless his
master is disarmed and down before the charge of a beast. When
an animal is killed the gunbearers skin it and care for the
trophy. Usually when on a shooting jaunt of several hours from
camp several porters go along to carry home the game.

Third in the social scale came the askaris—armed natives in
uniforms who guard the camp at night. One or more patrol the
camp all night long, keep up the fires and scare away any
marauding lion or hyena that may approach the camp. We had four
askaris, one of whom was the noisiest man I have ever heard. He
reminded me of a congressman when congress is not in
session.

Gunbearer—Askari—Tent Boy—Porter

Then came the cook, who is always quite an important member
of the community, because much of the pleasure of the
safari depends upon him. Our cook was one that the
Akeleys had on their former trip. His name was Abdullah, he had
a jovial face and a beaming smile, cooked well, and was funny
to look at. He wore a slouch hat with a red band around it, a
khaki suit and heavy shoes. When on the march he carried his
shoes and when in camp he wore a blue jersey and a polka-dotted
apron which took the place of trousers. He was good-natured,
which atoned somewhat for his slowness. The suggestion may be
made that he might not have been slow, but that our appetites
might have been so fast that he seemed slow.

The cook usually picks out a likely porter to help him, or a
toto, which means “little boy” in Swahili. There are
always a lot of boys who go along, unofficially, just for the
fun and the food of the trip. They are not hired, but go as
stowaways, and for the first few days out remain much in the
background. Gradually they appear more and more until all
chance of their being sent back has disappeared, and then they
become established members of the party. They carry small loads
and help brighten up the camp. Then there are the tent boys,
personal servants of the white people. Each white person has
his tent boy, who takes care of his tent, his bedding, his
bath, his clothes, and all his personal effects. A good tent
boy is a great feature on safari, for he relieves his
master of all the little worries of life. The tent boys always
wait on the table and do the family washing. They also see that
the drinking water is boiled and filtered and that the water
bottles are filled each evening.

Last of all come the porters, of whom we had eighty. There
were Swahilis, Wakambas, Kikuyus, Masai, Minyamwezis, Lumbwas,
Bagandas, Kavirondos, and doubtless members of various other
tribes. It was their duty to carry the camp from place to
place, each porter carrying sixty pounds on his head. When they
arrive at the spot selected for camp they put up the tents, get
in firewood, and carry in what game may later be shot by the
white men.

Then, lowest in the social scale, are the saises, or grooms.
There is one for each mule or horse, of which we had four. The
sais is always at hand to hold the mount and is supposed to
take care of it after hours.

The foregoing members of our personally conducted party,
therefore, included:

The head-man and the four gunbearers get seventy-five rupees
a month, the askaris fifteen rupees, the cook forty rupees, the
tent boys twenty and twenty-five rupees, depending upon
experience, the porters ten rupees, and the saises twelve
rupees. The totos get nothing except food and lodging,
as well as experience, which may be valuable when they grow up
to be porters at ten rupees a month. A rupee is about
thirty-three cents American. We were also required by law to
provide a water bottle, blanket, and sweater for each porter,
as well as uniforms and water bottles, shoes and blankets for
all the other members of the party. We also supplied twenty
tents for them.

For the first day or two on safari there may be
little hitches and delays, but after a short time the work is
reduced to a beautiful system, and camp is broken or pitched in
a remarkably short time. The porters get into the habit of
carrying a certain load and so there is usually little
confusion in distributing the packs.

At the Edge of the Athi River

The Totos Are Not Fastidious

Life and activity begin early in camp. You go to bed early
and before dawn you are awakened by the singing of countless
birds of many kinds. The air is fresh and cool, and you draw
your woolen blankets a little closer around you. The tent is
closed, but through the little cracks you can see that all is
still dark. In a few moments a faint grayness steals into the
air, and off in the half darkness you hear the Somali
gunbearers chanting their morning prayers—soft, musical, and
soothing. Then there are more voices murmuring in the air and
the camp slowly awakens to life. Some one is heard chopping
wood, and by that time day breaks with a crash. All is life,
and the birds are singing as though mad with the joy of life
and sunshine. A little later a shadowy figure appears by your
cot and says, “Chai, bwana” which means, “Tea,
master.”

You turn over and slowly sip the hot tea, while outside in
the clear morning air the sound of voices grows and grows until
you know that eighty or a hundred men are busy getting their
breakfasts. The crackling of many fires greets your ears and
the pungent smell of wood fires salutes your nostrils. You look
at your watch and it is perhaps five or half past. The air is
still cold and you hasten to slip out of your cot. It is never
considered wise to bathe in the morning here.

Your shoes or boots are by your bed, all oiled and cleaned,
and your puttees are neatly rolled, ready to be wound around
you from the tops of the shoes to the knee. Your clean flannels
(one always wears heavy flannel underclothes and heavy woolen
socks in this climate) are laid out and your clothes for the
day’s march are ready for you. You get into your clothes and
boots, go out of your tent, and find there a basin of hot water
and your toilet equipment. The basin is supported on a
three-pronged stick thrust into the ground and makes a
thoroughly satisfactory washstand. The fire in front of the
cook’s tent is burning merrily and he and his assistants are
busily at work on the morning breakfast. Twenty other
camp-fires are burning around the twenty small white tents that
the porters and others occupy, and scores of half-clad natives
are cooking their breakfasts. The ration that we were required
to give them was a pound and a half of ground-corn a day for
each man, but in good hunting country we got them a good deal
of meat to eat. They are very fond of hartebeest, zebra, rhino,
and especially hippo. In fact, they are eager to eat any kind
of meat, so that anything we killed was certain to be of
practical use as food for the porters. This fact greatly
relieves the conscience of the man who shoots an animal for its
fine horns. Six porters sleep in each of the little shelter
tents which we were required to supply them, and this number
sleeping so closely packed served to keep them warm through the
cold African highland nights.

By six o’clock our folding table in the mess tent is laid
with white linen and white enamel dishes for breakfast. So we
take our places. If we are in a fruit country we have some
oranges and bananas or papayas, a sort of pawpaw that is most
delicious; it is a cross between a cantaloupe and a mango. Then
we have oatmeal with evaporated cream and sugar; then we have
choice cuts from some animal that was killed the day
before—usually the liver or the tenderloin. Then we have eggs
and finish up on jam or marmalade and honey. We have coffee for
breakfast and tea for the other meals.

While we are eating the tent boys have packed our tin
trunks, our folding tent table, our cots and our pillows, cork
mattresses and blankets. The gunbearer gets our two favorite
rifles and cameras, field-glasses and water bottles. Then down
comes the double-roofed green tents, all is wrapped into
closely-packed bags, and before we are through with breakfast
all the tented village has disappeared and only the mess tent
and the two little outlying canvas shelters remain. It is a
scene of great activity. Porters are busily making up their
packs and the head-man with the askaris are busy directing
them. In a half-hour all that remains is a scattered assortment
of bundles, all neatly bound up in stout cords.

One man may carry a tent-bag and poles, another a tin
uniform case with a shot-gun strapped on top; another may have
a bedding roll and a chair or table, and so on until the whole
outfit is reduced to eighty compact bundles which include the
food for the porters, the ant-proof food boxes with our own
food, and the horns and skins of our trophies. The work of
breaking camp is reduced to a science.

Our gunbearers are waiting and the saises with the mules are
in readiness. So we start off, usually walking the first hour
or two, with gunbearers and saises and mules trailing along
behind. Soon afterward we look back to see the long procession
of porters following along in single file. Our tent boys carry
our third rifle, and behind them all comes the head-man, ready
to spur on any lagging porters.

Our Safari on the March

The early morning hours are bright and cool, but along about
nine o’clock the equatorial sun begins to beat down upon our
heavy sun helmets and our red-lined and padded spine
protectors. But it is seldom hot for long. A cloud passes
across the sun and instantly everything is cooled. A wave of
wind sweeps across the hill and cools the moist brow like a
camphor compress. An instant later the sun is out again and the
land lies swimming in the shimmer of heat waves. Distant hills
swim on miragic lakes, and if we are in plains country the
mirages appear upon all sides.

We rarely shot while on a march from camp to camp. We walked
or rode along, watching the swarms of game that slowly moved
away as we approached. The scenery was beautiful. Sometimes we
wound along on game trails or native trails through vast
park-like stretches of rolling hills; at other times we climbed
across low hills studded with thorn scrub, while off in the
distance rose the blue hills and mountains. To the northward,
always with us, was the great Mount Kenia, eighteen thousand
feet high and nearly always veiled with masses of clouds. On
her slopes are great droves of elephants, and we could pick out
the spot where three years before Mrs. Akeley had killed her
elephant with the record pair of tusks.

Our marches were seldom long. At noon or even earlier we
arrived at our new camping place, ten or twelve miles from our
starting of the morning. Frequently we loitered along so that
the porters might get there first and the camp be fully
established when we arrived. At other times we arrived early
and picked out a spot, where ticks and malaria were not likely
to be bothersome.

We usually camped near a river. Our first camp was on the
Athi Plains, near Nairobi; our second at Nairobi Falls, where
the river plunges down a sixty-foot drop in a spot of great
beauty. Our third camp was on the Induruga River, in a
beautiful but malarious spot; our fifth was on the Thika Thika
River, where it was so cold in the morning that the vapor of
our breathing was visible; and our sixth on a wind-blown hill
where a whirlwind blew down our mess tent and scattered the
cook’s fire until the whole grass veldt was in furious flames.
It took a hundred men an hour to put out the flames.

Our next camp was at Fort Hall, where a poisonous snake came
into my tent while I was working. It crawled under my chair and
was by my feet when I saw it. It was chased out and killed in
the grass near my tent, and a porter cut out the fangs to show
me. For a day or two I looked before putting on my shoes, but
after that I ceased to think of it.

After that time our camps were along the Tana River, in a
beautiful country thronged with game, but, unhappily, a
district into which comparatively few hunters come on account
of the fever that is said to prevail there. We were obliged to
leave our mules at Fort Hall because it was considered certain
death to them if we took them into this fly belt.

When the porters arrive at a camping place a good spot is
picked out for our four tents and mess tent, the cook tent is
located, and in a short time the camp is ready. In my tent the
cot is spread, with blankets airing; the mosquito net is up,
the table is ready, with toilet articles, books and cigars laid
out. The three tin uniform cases are in their places, my
cameras are in their places, as are also the guns and lanterns.
A floor cloth covers the ground and a long easy chair is ready
for occupancy. Towels and water are ready, and pajamas and
cholera belt are on the pillow of the cot. Everything is done
that should be done, and I am immediately in a well established
house with all my favorite articles in their accustomed
places.

The Safari in Camp

A luncheon, with fruit, meat, curry and a pastry is ready by
the time we are, and then we smoke or sleep through the
broiling midday hours. Mr. Stephenson—or “Fred,” as he is with
us—and I go out on a scouting expedition and look for good
specimens to add to our collection of horns or to get food for
the porters. Sometimes the whole party went out, either
photographing charging rhinos or shooting, but this part of the
daily program was usually too varied to generalize as part of
the daily doings. Several porters went with each of us to bring
in the game, which there is rarely any uncertainty of
securing.

In the evening we return and find our baths of hot water
ready. We take off our heavy hunting boots and slip into the
soft mosquito boots. After which dinner is ready and our menu
is strangely varied. Sometimes we have kongoni steaks, at other
times we have the heart of waterbuck or the liver of bushbuck
or impalla. Twice we had rhino tongue and once rhino tail soup.
We eat, and at six o’clock the darkness of night suddenly
spreads over the land. We talk over our several adventures of
the afternoon, some of which may be quite thrilling, and then,
with camp chairs drawn around the great camp-fire, and with the
sentinel askari pacing back and forth, we spend a drowsy hour
in talking. Gradually the sounds of night come on. Off there a
hyena is howling or a zebra is barking, and we know that
through all those shadowy masses of trees the beasts of prey
are creeping forth for their night’s hunting. The porters’
tents are ranged in a wide semicircle, and their camp-fires
show little groups of men squatting about them. Somewhere one
is playing a tin flute, another is playing a French harp, and
some are singing. It is a picture never to be forgotten, and
rich with a charm that will surely always send forth its call
to the restless soul of the man who goes back to the city.

Sometimes the evening program is different. When one of us
brings in some exceptional trophy there is a great celebration,
with singing and native dances, and cheers for the Bwana who
did the heroic deed. The first lion in a camp is a signal for
great rejoicing and celebrating—however, that is another
story—the story of my first lion.

At nine o’clock the tents are closed and all the camp is
quiet in sleep. Outside in the darkness the askari paces to and
fro, and the thick masses of foliage stand out in inky
blackness against the brilliant tropic night. We are far from
civilization, but one has as great a feeling of security as
though he were surrounded by chimneys and electric lights. And
no sleep is sweeter than that which has come after a day’s
marching over sun-swept hills or through the tangled reed beds
where every sense must always be on the alert for hidden
dangers.

CHAPTER VI

A LION DRIVE. WITH A RHINO IN RANGE SOME ONE SHOUTS “SIMBA”
AND I GET MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF A WILD LION. THREE SHOTS AND
OUT

Like every one who goes to Africa
with a gun and a return ticket, I had two absorbing ambitions.
One was to kill a lion and the other to live to tell about it.
In my estimation all the other animals compared to a lion as
latitude eighty-seven and a half compares to the north pole. I
wanted to climb out of the Tartarin of Tarascon class of near
lion hunters into the ranks of those who are entitled to
remark, “Once, when I was in Africa shooting lions,” etc. A
dead lion is bogey in the big game sport—the score that every
hunter dreams of achieving—and I was extremely eager to make
the dream a reality.

When speaking with English sportsmen in London my first
question was, “Did you get any lions?” If they had, they at
once rose in my estimation; if not, no matter how many
elephants or rhinos or buffaloes they may have shot, they still
remained in the amateur class.

On the steamer going down to Mombasa the hunting talk was
four-fifths lion and one-fifth about other game. The cripple
who had been badly mauled by a lion was a person of much
distinction, even more so than the ivory hunter who had killed
three hundred elephants.

Mr. Stephenson’s Lion

A Post Mortem Inquiry

On the railway to Nairobi every eye was on the lookout for
lions and every one gazed with intense interest at the station
of Tsavo and remembered the famous pair of man-eaters that had
terrorized that place some years before.

In Nairobi the men who had killed lions, and those who had
been mauled by them (and there are many of the latter), were
objects of vast concern, and the little cemetery with its many
headstones marked “Killed by lion” added still greater fire to
my interest.

The Jolly Little Cemetery

Consequently, when we marched out of Nairobi on the evening
of September twenty-third, with tents and guns and a hundred
and twenty men, the dominating thought was of lions. If ever
any one had greater hope and less expectation of killing a lion
I was the one.

We had planned a short trip of from three to five weeks
northeast of Nairobi in what is called the Tana River country.
While there are some lions in that section, as there are in
most parts of British East Africa, it is not considered a good
lion country. Buffaloes, rhinos, hippos, giraffes, and many
varieties of smaller game are abundant, largely because the
Tana River is in a bad fever belt and hunting parties generally
prefer to go elsewhere. This preliminary trip was intended to
perfect our shooting, so that later, when in real lion country,
we might be better equipped to take on the king of beasts with
some promise of hitting him.

Peering for Lions

The tree-tops and corrugated iron roofs of Nairobi had
hardly dropped behind a long, sun-soaked hump of the Athi
Plains when I began to peel my eyes inquiringly for lions. All
the lion stories that I had heard for the preceding few months
paraded back and forth in my memory, and if ever a horizon was
thoroughly scanned for lion, that horizon just out of Nairobi
was the one. Hartebeests in droves loped awkwardly away from
the trail and then turned and looked with wondering interest at
us. Zebras, too fat to run, trotted off, and also turned to
observe the invaders. Gazelles did the same, and away off in
the distance a few wildebeests went galloping slowly to a safe
distance. They were probably safe at any distance had they only
known it, for up to the hour when I cantered forth from Nairobi
in quest of lions and rhinos I had not shot at anything for
three years, nor hit anything for ten.

Night came on—the black, sudden night of Africa—and we
went into camp four miles from Nairobi without ever having
heard the welcome roar of a lion. It was a distinct
disappointment. I remembered the story about the lions that
stampeded the zebras through the peaceful gardens of Nairobi
only a few nights before—also the report that some man-eaters
had been recently partaking of nourishment along the very road
upon which we were now camping. I also remembered hearing that
lions had been seen prowling around the edge of the town and
that the Athi Plains are a time-honored habitat of the lion
family. On the other hand, I thought of Mr. Roosevelt, who had
recently been reducing the supply. I also remembered how many
hunters had spent years in Africa without ever seeing a lion,
and how Doctor Rainsford had made two different hunting trips
to Africa, always looking for lions, but without success.

During our first three days of marching, we looked
industriously for lions. On broad, grassy plain, in low scrub,
on the slopes of low hills—everywhere we looked for them. If a
flock of vultures circled above a distant spot we went over at
once in the hope of surprising a lion at his kill. Every reed
bed was promptly investigated, every dry nullah was explored.
McMillan’s farm, which is a farm only in name, was scoured
without ever a sign or a hint that a lion lurked thereabouts.
Mr. McMillan has four lions in a cage, but they snarled so
savagely that we hastened away to look for lions elsewhere. The
second day we crossed the Nairobi River, the third day we
crossed the Induruga River, and the fourth day we camped down
on the Athi River. Here we struck a clue. Two English settlers
came over and told us that lions had been heard the night
before near their ranch house, on the slopes of Donyo Sabuk, a
high solitary round top mountain rising from the Athi Plains,
and we determined to organize our first lion hunt. It was here
that Mr. Lucas was killed by a lion a short time before.

A lion hunt, or a lion drive, is quite a ceremony. You take
thirty or forty natives, go to the place where the lion was
heard, and then beat every bit of cover in the hope of scaring
out the beasts. Lions are fond of lying up during the day in
dry reed beds, and when you go out looking for them, you are
most likely to find them in such places.

Mr. Stephenson’s Splendid Buffalo

“Lion Camp”

The Lion and Lioness in Camp

We started, three of us, with forty porters, at about
daybreak. At seven o’clock we had climbed up the side of the
mountain to the spot where the lions were supposed to be
lurking—a long, reed-filled cleft in the side of the slope.
The porters were sent up to one end of the reed bed, twenty on
each side, while we went below to where the lion would probably
be driven out by their shouting and noise. The porters
bombarded the reeds with stones while we waited with rifles
ready for the angry creature to dash out in our vicinity. It
was an interesting wait, with plenty of food for thought. I
wondered why the Englishmen had not come out to get the lions
themselves, and then remembered that one of them had been
mauled by a lion and had henceforth remained neutral in all
lion fights. I wondered many other things which I have now
forgotten. I was quite busy wondering for some time as I
waited. In the meantime the lions failed to appear.

Bushbuck, waterbuck, and lots of other herbivora appeared,
but no carnivora. We raked the reed bed fore and aft, and
combed the long grass in every direction. A young rhino was
startled in his morning nap, ran around excitedly for a while,
and then trotted off. Birds of many varieties fluttered up and
wondered what the racket was about. At ten o’clock we decided
that the lions had failed to do their part of the program, and
that no further developments were to be expected. So we marched
back homeward, got mixed up with another rhino, and finally
gained camp, seven miles away, just as our hunger had reached
an advanced stage.

The next day we marched to the Thika Thika River, then to
Punda Milia, and then to Fort Hall. Some one claimed to have
heard a lion out from Fort Hall early in the morning, but I
more than half suspect it was one of our porters who
reverberates when he sleeps. From Fort Hall we crossed the Tana
and made three marches down the river. Rhinos were everywhere
jumping out from behind bushes when least expected and in many
ways behaving in a most diverting way. For a time we forgot
lions while dodging rhinos. There were dozens of them in the
thick, low scrub, with now and then a bunch of eland, or a herd
of waterbuck, or a few hundred of the ubiquitous kongoni.

We camped in a beautiful spot down on the Tana. The country
looked like a park, with graceful trees scattered about on the
rolling lawn-like hills. On all sides was game in great
profusion. Hippos played about in the river, baboons scampered
about on the edge of the water, monkeys chattered in the trees,
and it seemed as though nearly all of the eight hundred
varieties of East African birds gave us a morning serenade. A
five-minutes’ walk from camp would show you a rhino, while from
the top of any knoll one could look across a vast sweep of
hills upon which almost countless numbers of zebras, kongoni,
and other animals might be seen.

But never a lion. It certainly looked discouraging.

As a form of pleasant excitement, we began to photograph
rhinos, Mr. Akeley took out his moving-picture machine,
advanced it cautiously to within a few yards of the
unsuspecting rhino, and then we tried to provoke a charge. We
took a dozen or more rhinos in this way, often approaching to
within a few yards, and if there is any more exciting diversion
I don’t know what it is. I’ve looped the loop and there is no
comparison. It is more like being ambushed by Filipino
insurgents—that is, it’s the same kind of excitement, with
more danger.

One day it was necessary to shoot a big bull rhino. He
staggered and fell, but at once got up and trotted over a hill.
Having wounded him, it was then necessary for me to follow him,
which I did for three blazing hours. From nine o’clock till
twelve I followed, with the sun beating down on the dry,
grass-covered hills as though it meant to burn up everything
beneath it. If any one had asked me, “Is it hot enough for
you?” I should have answered “Yes” without a moment’s
hesitation. The horizon shimmered in waves of heat. From the
top of one hill I could see my rhino half a mile away on the
slope of another. When I reached the slope he was a mile
farther on. I began to think he was a mirage. For a wounded
animal, with two five-hundred-grain shells in his shoulder, he
was the most astonishing example of vitality I have ever seen.
He would have been safe against a Gatling gun. There were more
low trees a mile farther on, and I plodded doggedly on in the
hope of getting a little relief from the sun. As I drew near I
noticed a rhino standing under the trees, but he was not the
wounded one. I decided that the shade was insufficient for both
of us and moved swiftly on. Across the valley on the slope of
another blistered hill stood the one I was looking for. He
didn’t seem to be in the chastened mood of one who is about to
die. He seemed vexed about something, probably the two cordite
shells he was carrying. I at last came up within a hundred
yards of him. He had got my wind and was facing me with tail
nervously erect. The tail of a rhino is an infallible barometer
of his state of mind. With his short sight, I knew that he
could not see me at that distance, but I knew that he had
detected the direction in which the danger lay. By slowly
moving ahead, the distance was cut to about seventy yards,
which was not too far away in an open country with a wounded
rhino in the foreground. I resolved to shoot before he charged
or before he ran away, and so I prepared to end the long chase
with an unerring shot.

Suddenly a sound struck my ear that acted upon me like an
electric shock:

“Simba!“

It was the one word that I had been hoping to hear ever
since leaving Nairobi, for the word means “lion.” My Somali
gunbearer was eagerly pointing toward a lone tree that stood a
hundred yards off to the left. A huge, hulking animal was
slowly moving away from it. It was my first glimpse of a wild
lion. He was half concealed in the tall, dry grass and in a few
seconds had entirely disappeared from view. We rushed after
him. The rhino was completely forgotten and was left to charge
or run away as he saw fit. When we reached the spot where the
lion was last seen there was no trace of him. He apparently was
not “as brave as a lion.” We followed the course that he
presumably took and presently reached the crest of a ridge.
Then the second gunbearer, a keen-eyed Kikuyu, discovered the
lion three hundred yards off to the right. After reaching the
top of the hill the animal had swung directly off at right
angles with the idea of reaching cover in a dry creek bed some
distance away. I started to shoot at three hundred yards, but
before I could take a careful aim the lion had disappeared in
the grass. For an hour we thrashed the high reeds in the dry
creek bed with never a sign of the king of beasts. He had
apparently abdicated. He had vanished so completely that I
thought he had escaped toward some low hills a mile farther on.
The disappointment of seeing a lion and not getting it, or at
least shooting at it, was keen to a degree that actually
hurt.

Game Was Plenty for a Minute or Two

There was nothing left but to resume our chase after the
wounded rhino. It was like going back to work after a pleasant
two weeks’ vacation. We presently found him on a far distant
hill, and after an hour’s tramp in the sun we came up to him in
the middle of the rolling prairie. There was not a tree for a
mile, nor a single avenue of escape in case he charged.
Horticulture had never interested me especially, but just at
this moment I think a tree, even a thorn tree, would have been
a pleasant subject for intimate study. However, to make a long
story longer, I shot him at a hundred yards and felt certain
that both shells struck. Yet he wheeled around and, stumbling
occasionally, was off like a railway train. Again we followed,
two miles of desperate tramping in that merciless sun, up hills
and down hills, until finally we entirely lost all trace of
him. It was now two o’clock. I had eaten nothing since five
o’clock in the morning, my water bottle was so nearly empty
that I dared take only a swallow at a time, my knees were sore
from climbing hills and wading through the tall, dry prairie
grass, and I decided to give up this endless pursuit of a rhino
who wouldn’t die after being hit with four cordite shells.

The dry creek bed lay in the course of our homeward march,
and we resolved to take a final look at it. There seemed no
likelihood that the lion was there, and I walked into the place
with the supreme courage of one who doesn’t expect to find
anything hostile. My head gunbearer and I had crossed and were
walking down in the grass at one side. My second gunbearer was
on the opposite side, and the stillness of death hung over the
burning plain.

There was not a sign of life in any direction. The second
gunbearer was instructed to set fire to the grass in the hope
of awakening some protest from the lion in case he was still in
the vicinity. There was a dry crackling of flames, and before
we could count ten a deep growl came from somewhere in front of
me, evidently on one of the edges of the creek bed. The second
gunbearer was the first to locate him, and he signaled for me
to come over on his side of the creek. In a moment I had dashed
down and had climbed out on the other side and was eagerly
gazing at a clump of bushes indicated by the Kikuyu. At first I
could distinguish nothing, but soon I saw the tawny flanks and
the lashing tail of the lion. His head was hidden by the
bushes. At that time we were about a hundred yards from him and
it was necessary to circle off to a point where the rest of his
body could be seen. A little side ravine intervened, and I had
to cross it and come directly down through the clump of bushes.
The grass was high, and it was not until I had come within
forty yards of the lion that I could get a clear view of him.
He was glaring at me, with tail waving angrily, and his mouth
was opened in a savage snarl. I could see that he didn’t like
me.

I raised the little .256 Mannlicher, aimed carefully at his
open mouth and fired. The lion turned a back somersault and a
great thrill of exultation suffused me. Already I saw the
handsomely mounted lion-skin rug ornamenting my den at home. We
approached cautiously, always remembering that the real danger
of lion hunting comes after the lion has been shot. We threw
stones in the grass where he had lain, but no answering growl
was heard. I thought he was dead, but when we finally reached
the spot where he had been there was no sign of him. He had
vanished again. I searched the ravine and then crossed to the
high grass on the other side. Then we saw him for an instant,
half-concealed, just in front of us. His head was hanging, and
he looked as though he had been hard hit. Again he disappeared
and we searched high and low for him. For several hundred feet
we beat the grass without result.

Then the grass was again fired and again the hoarse growl
came in angry protest. Walking slowly, with guns ready for
instant use, we advanced until we could see him under a tree
seventy yards ahead on my side of the ravine. He was growling
angrily. This time I used the double-barreled cordite rifle and
the first shot struck him in the forehead without knocking him
down. He sprang up and the second shot stretched him out. He
was still alive when I came up to him, and a small bullet was
fired into the base of his brain to reduce the danger of a
final charge.

Old hunters always caution one about approaching a dying
lion, for often the beast musters up unexpected vitality, makes
a final charge, kills somebody, and then dies happy. So we
waited a few feet away until the last quiver of his sides had
passed. One of the boys pulled his tail and shook him, but
there was no sign of life. He was extinct.

A new danger now threatened. The grass fire that the second
gunbearer had started was sweeping the prairie, fanned by a
strong wind, and there seemed to be not only the danger of
abandoning the lion, but of being forced to flee before the
flames. So we fell to work beating out the nearest fires, and
trusted that a shifting of the wind would send the course of
the flames in another direction.

It was now four o’clock. We were nine miles from camp and
food, and we knew that at six o’clock darkness would suddenly
descend, leaving us out in a rhino-infested country, far from
camp. The water was nearly gone and the general outlook was far
from pleasing.

The gunbearers skinned the lion. My first shot had struck
one of his back teeth, breaking it squarely off, and then
passed through the fleshy part of the neck. It was a wound that
would startle, but not kill. The second shot had hit him
between the eyes, but had glanced off the skull, merely ripping
open the skin on the forehead for five inches. The third shell
had killed him, except for the convulsive heaving that was
finally stilled by the small bullet in the base of the
brain.

As I Planned to Look in the Photograph of “My First
Lion”

The skinning was interesting. All the fat in certain parts
of the body was saved, for East Indians bid high for it and use
it as a lubricant for rheumatic pains. The two shoulder blades
are always saved and are considered a valuable trophy. They are
little bones three inches long, unattached and floating, and
have long since ceased to perform any function in the working
of the body. The broken tooth was found and saved, and, of
course, a photograph was taken. My gunbearer took the picture,
and when it was developed there was only a part of the lion and
part of the lion slayer visible. It was a good picture of the
tree, however.

As I Looked—From Photograph by Gunbearer

At four-thirty the homeward march was begun. At five-thirty
two rhinos blocked the path and one of them had to be shot. At
six we were still several miles from camp, with the country
wrapped in darkness. The water was gone and only one shell
remained for the big gun. Somewhere ahead were miles of thorn
scrub in which there might be rhinos or buffaloes. Two days
before I had killed two large buffaloes in the district through
which we must pass, and there was every likelihood of others
still being there. At seven we were hopelessly lost in a wide
stretch of hippo grass, and I had to fire a shot in the hope of
getting an answering shot from camp. In a couple of moments we
heard the distant shot, and then pressed on toward camp. The
lion had been carried on ahead while we stopped with the rhino,
and so the news reached the camp before us. A long line of
porters came out to greet us and a great reception committee
was waiting at the camp. It was the first lion of the
expedition, and as such was the signal for great celebration.
That night there were native dances and songs around the big
central camp-fire and a wonderful display of pagan
hilarity.

It had been a hard day. Fourteen hours without food, several
hours without water, and miles of hard tramping through thorn
scrub in the darkness and of long, broiling stretches in the
blazing sunlight. It seemed a good price to pay even for a
lion, but that night, as I finally stretched out on my cot, I
was conscious from time to time of a glow of pleasure that
swept over me. It seemed that of all human gratifications there
was none equal to that experienced by the man who has killed
his first lion.

My second lion experience came three days later. With a
couple of tents and about forty porters our party of four had
marched across to a point a couple of miles from where I had
killed the lion. We hoped to put in a day or two looking for
lions, some of which had been reported in that district. The
porters went on ahead with the camp equipment, while we came
along more slowly. Mr. Akeley had taken some close-range
photographs of rhinos, and we were just on the point of
starting direct for the new camp when we ran across two
enormous rhinos standing in the open plain. One was extremely
large, with an excellent pair of horns, and it was arranged
that I should try to secure this one as a trophy, while Mr.
Akeley secured a photograph of the event. At thirty-five yards
I shot the larger one of the two, and it dropped in its tracks.
The other started to charge, but was finally driven away by
shouting and by shots fired in the air. The photograph was
excellent and quite dramatic.

For an hour the gunbearers worked on the dead rhino and
finally secured the head and feet and certain desirable parts
of the skin. At noon we resumed our march for camp, two or
three miles away. We had hardly gone half the distance when one
of the tent boys was seen far ahead, riding the one mule that
we had dared to bring down the Tana River. It was evident that
something important had occurred and we hurried on to meet
him.

“Simba!” he shouted, as soon as he could be heard.
In a moment we had the details. One of the saises had seen two
lions, a large male and female, quite near the camp. Porters
were instructed to watch the beasts until we should arrive, and
now were supposed to be in touch with them. We omitted luncheon
and struck off at once in the direction indicated by the tent
boy. We soon came up to the porters and an instant later saw
the lions. It was a beautiful sight. The two animals were
majestically walking up the rocky slope of a low, fire-scorched
hill a few hundred yards away. The male was a splendid beast,
with all the splendid dignity of one who fears nothing in the
whole wide world. From time to time the two lions stopped and
looked back at us, but with no sign of fear. Several times they
lay down, but soon would resume their stately course up among
the rocks.

I shall never forget the picture that lay before me. It was
as though some famous lion painting of Gérôme or
Landseer had come to life, sometimes the animals being outlined
clearly against the blue sky and at other times standing, with
splendid heads erect, upon the rocks of the low ridge that rose
ahead of us.

We stalked them easily. Several porters were left where the
lions could constantly see them, while we three, Akeley,
Stephenson and I, with our six gunbearers, worked around the
base of the hill until we were able to climb up on the crest of
it, being thus constantly screened from view of the lions. At
the crest was an abrupt outcropping of blackened rocks, where
we stopped to locate the two animals. They were nowhere to be
seen. Twenty-five yards farther along on the crest was another
little ledge of rocks, and we worked our way silently along to
it in the expectation that the lions might have advanced that
far. But even then our search disclosed nothing. For some time
we waited, scouring the neighborhood with our glasses, and had
almost reached the conclusion that the lions had made off down
the other side of the hill and had reached the cover of a
shallow ravine some distance away. Then we saw them—exactly
where we had last seen them before we had started our stalk.
They were still together and showed no sign of alarm nor
knowledge of our presence so near them. At this time they were
one hundred and ten yards away. They lay down again behind the
rocks and we waited twenty minutes for them to show themselves.
Off to our right and in the valley another large male lion
appeared and moved slowly away among the low scrub trees.

Finally we decided to rouse the two lions by shouting, but
before this decision could be carried out the male rose above
the rocks and stood plainly in view. It had previously been
arranged that Mr. Stephenson should try for the male, while I
should try for the female. In an instant he fired with his big
rifle, the lion whirled around and then started running down
the hill to the right.

Then the lioness appeared and I wounded her with my first
shot. She ran out in the open toward us, but evidently without
knowing from where the firing came. A second shot was better
placed and I saw her collapse in her tracks. Leaving the
lioness, I went down to where Stephenson had followed the lion.
Several shots had been fired, but the lion was still running,
although badly wounded. Just as it reached a small tree down on
the slope a shot was put into a vital spot, and the lion went
wildly over on his side. Even then he managed to drag himself
under the small bushes surrounding the tree, where a moment
later Mr. Stephenson killed him with a shot from his .318
Mauser.

“A Very Interesting Experience,” Said I Coolly, a
Couple of Days Later

We measured and photographed the lion, and then I took my
camera to get a picture of the dead lioness up on the ridge.
She was sitting up snarling, and I was the most surprised
person in the world. I shot at her and she ran fifty yards to a
small tree, where she came to a stop. Two more shots from my
big gun finished her, and the photograph was finally
secured.

Leaving the porters to watch the two lions, we followed the
third lion that had been seen in the valley. He had not gone
far and we soon found him, but too far away to get a shot. For
an hour we followed him, but he finally disappeared and could
not be located again.

It was sundown when our porters reached camp with the two
lions, and it was then that we ate our long-deferred
luncheon.

A week later, while marching from the Tana River to the Zeka
River, Mr. and Mrs. Akeley and I came across a large lion,
accompanied by a lioness. They were first seen moving away
across a low sloping ridge of the plains within a couple of
miles of where we had killed the lion and lioness a week
before. We followed them and came up with them after a brisk
walk of ten minutes. Both were hiding in the grass near the
crest of the slope, and we could see their ears and eyes above
the long grass. We crouched down a hundred yards away and the
lion rose to see where we had gone. Mrs. Akeley fired and
missed, but her second shot pierced his brain and he fell like
a log. We expected a charge from the lioness and waited until
she should declare herself. But she did not appear and her
whereabouts remained an anxious mystery until she was finally
seen several hundred yards away making her way slowly up a
distant hill. Half-way up she sat down and watched us as we
made our way cautiously in the grass to where her mate lay as
he fell, stone dead. We afterward followed her, but she escaped
from view and could not be located. This lion was the largest
we had seen and measured nine feet from tip to tip.

This was our last experience with lions in the Trans-Tana
country. After that we went up in the elephant country on Mount
Kenia, but that is a story all in itself.

Lion hunting is the best kind of African hunting in one
respect. One feels no self-reproach in having killed a lion,
for there is always the comforting thought that by killing one
lion you have saved the lives of three hundred other animals.
Every lion exacts an annual toll of at least that number of
zebras, hartebeests, or other forms of antelopes, all of which
are powerless to defend themselves against the great creature
that creeps upon them in cover of darkness. So a lion hunter
may consider himself something of a benefactor.

CHAPTER VII

ON THE TANA RIVER, THE HOME OF THE RHINO. THE TIMID ARE
FRIGHTENED, THE DANGEROUS KILLED, AND OTHERS PHOTOGRAPHED.
MOVING PICTURES OF A RHINO CHARGE

Down on the Tana River the rhinos
are more common than in any other known section of Africa. In
two weeks we saw over one hundred—perhaps two hundred—of
them—so many, in fact, that one of the chief diversions of the
day was to count rhinos. One day we counted twenty-six, another
day nineteen, and by the time we left the district rhinos had
become such fixtures in the landscape as to cause only casual
comment. Perhaps there were some repeaters, ones that were
counted twice, but even allowing for that there were still some
left. We saw big ones and little ones, old ones and young ones,
and middle-aged ones; ones with long ears, short horns, double
horns, and single horns; black ones and red ones—in fact, all
the kinds of rhinos that are resident in British East Africa.
One had an ear gone and another had a crook in his tail. If we
had stayed another week we might have got out a Tana River
Rhino Directory, with addresses and tree numbers. We studied
them fore and aft, from in front of trees and from behind them,
from close range and long range, over our shoulders, and
through our cameras, every way whereby a conscientious lover of
life and nature can study a prominent member of the Mammalia.
We called the place Rhino Park because the country looks like a
beautiful park studded with splendid trees and dotted with
rhinos.

A Morning Walk on the Tana River

When I went to Africa I was equipped with the following fund
of knowledge concerning the rhinoceros: First, that he is
familiarly called “rhino” by the daring hunters who have
written about him; second, that he is a member of the
Perissodactyl family, whose sole representatives are the horse,
the rhino, and the tapir; third, that he savagely charges human
beings who write books about their thrilling adventures in
Africa, and, finally, that he looks like a hang-over from the
pterodactyl age. The books and magazine stories that have come
out since Mr. Roosevelt made African hunting the vogue
invariably describe the rhino as being one of the most
dangerous of African animals. A charging rhino, a wounded lion,
a cape buffalo, and a frenzied elephant are the four terrors of
the African hunters. All other forms of danger are slight
compared with these, and I was full to the guards with a vast
and fearful respect for the rhino. I fancied myself spinning
around like a pinwheel with the horn of a rhino as a pivot, and
the thought had little to commend itself to a lover of
longevity—such as myself, for instance.

A Comfortable Hammock of Zebra Skin

Mrs. Akeley and Her Tana River Monkey

After going to Africa and meeting some of the best members
of the rhino set I was able to form some conclusions of my own,
chief of which is the belief that he is dangerous only if he
hits you. As long as you can keep out of his reach you are in
no great danger except from the thorns.

The prevailing estimate of the rhino is that he is an
inoffensive creature who likes to bask under the shade of a
tree and watch the years go parading by. His thick skin and
fierce armament of horns seem to make of him a relic of some
long-forgotten age—the last survivor of the time when mammoths
and dinosauruses roamed the manless waste and time was counted
in geological terms instead of days and minutes. His eyes are
dimmed and he sees nothing beyond a few yards away, but his
hearing and sense of smell are keen, and he sniffs danger from
afar in case danger happens to be to windward of him. His
sensitive nose is always alert for foreign and, therefore,
suspicious odors, and when he smells the blood of an
Englishman, or even an American, his tail goes up in anger, he
sniffs and snorts and races around in a circle while he locates
the direction where the danger lies—and then, look out. A
blind, furious rush which only a well-sped bullet can prevent
causing the untimely end of whatever happens to be in the way.
That is the popular estimate of the rhino.

Popular Conception of Rhino

Here are some of the conclusions I have formed: If the
hunter carefully approaches the rhino from the leeward he may
often come within a few yards of the animal and might easily
shoot him in a leisurely way. The rhino can see only at close
range and can smell only when the wind blows the scent to him.
Consequently he would be defenseless and at the mercy of the
hunter if it were not for one thing. Nature, in her wisdom, has
sent the little rhino bird to act as a sentinel for the great
pachyderm. These little birds live on the back of the rhino
and, as recompense for their vigilance, are permitted to
partake of such ticks and insects as inhabit the hide of their
host. Whenever danger, or, in other words, whenever a hunter
tries to approach their own particular rhino from any
direction, windward, leeward, or any other way, the ever alert
and watchful rhino birds sound a tocsin of warning. The rhino
pricks up his ears and begins to show signs of taking notice.
He doesn’t know where or what the danger may be, but he knows
the C.Q.D. code of danger signals as delivered to him from the
outposts on his back and hastens to get busy in an effort to
locate the foe. As a general thing the little birds, on sight
of danger, begin a wild chatter, rising from the back of the
rhino and flying in an opposite direction from the danger. Then
they return, light on the rhino’s back, and repeat, often
several times, the operation of flying away from the danger. If
the rhino is a wise rhino he learns from the birds which is the
safe way to go and soon trots swiftly off. In a measure the
habits of the rhino bird are as interesting as those of the
rhino itself, and as an example of the weak protecting the
strong, the Damon and Pythias relationship between bird and
beast is without parallel in the animal kingdom.

Before and After the Rhino Birds Give the
Alarm

The rhino is a peaceful animal. He browses on herbs and
shrubs and dwells in friendly relationship with the rest of the
animal kingdom. Perhaps once or twice a day he ambles down to
some favorite drinking place for a drink, but the rest of the
time he grazes along a hillside or stands or lies sleepily
under a tree. At such times as the latter he may be approached
quite near without much danger. Each day he also goes to a
favorite wallowing place, where he rolls in the red dirt and
emerges from this dirt bath a dull red rhino. In the rhino
country dozens of these red dirt rolling places may be found,
each one trampled smooth for an area of fifteen or twenty feet
in evidence of the great number of times it has been used by
one or more rhinos. This dirt bath is a defensive measure
against the hordes of ticks that infest the rhino. It is a
subject for wonder that the six or eight tick birds do not keep
the rhino free of ticks, and it has even been argued by some
naturalists that the rhino bird does not eat ticks, but merely
uses the rhino as a convenient resting-place. Also perhaps they
enjoy the ride. We had planned to get a rhino bird and perform
an autopsy on him in order to analyze his contents, but did not
do so.

The Ford of Tana River

The Baby Rhino

After the rhino has taken his dirt wallow, and looks fine in
his new red coat, he then slowly and painstakingly proceeds to
kill time during the rest of the day. If danger threatens he
becomes exceedingly nervous and excited. His anxiety is quite
acute. In vain he tries to locate the danger, rushing one way
for a few yards, then the other way, and finally all ways at
once. His tail is up and he is snorting like a steam engine.
When he rushes toward you in this attitude it looks very much
as though he were charging you with the purpose of trampling
you to flinders. As a matter of fact, or, rather, opinion, he
is merely trying to locate where you are in order that he may
run the other way. He looks terrifying, but in reality is
probably badly terrified himself. He would give a good deal to
know which way to run, and finally becomes so excited and
nervous that he starts frantically in some direction, hoping
for the best. If this rush happens to be in your direction you
call it a charge from an infuriated rhino; if not, you say that
he looked nasty and was about to charge, but finally ran away
in another direction. In most rhino charges it is my opinion
that the rhino is too rattled to know what he is doing, and,
instead of charging maliciously, he is merely trying to get
away as fast as possible. And in such cases the hunter blazes
away at him, wounds him, and the rhino blindly charges the
flash.

Trying to Provoke a Charge

It was our wish to get moving pictures of a rhino charge.
Mr. Akeley had a machine and our plan of action was simple. We
would first locate the rhino, usually somnolent under a thorn
tree or browsing soberly out in the open. We would then get to
the leeward of him and slowly advance the machine; Mr. Akeley
in the middle and Stephenson and I on each side with our
double-barreled cordite rifles. In case the charge became too
serious to escape we hoped to be able to turn him or kill the
rhino with our four bullets. If we were unsuccessful in doing
so—well, we had to manage the situation by jumping.

Our first experience was most thrilling, chiefly because we
expected a charge. We thought all rhinos charged, as per the
magazine articles, and so prepared for busy doings. A rhino cow
and half-grown calf were discovered on a distant hillside. We
stopped in a ravine to adjust the picture machine and then
crept cautiously up the hill until we were within about seventy
yards of the unsuspecting pair. Then the rhino birds began to
flutter and chatter and the two beasts began to sniff
nervously. Finally they turned toward us, with tails erect and
noses sniffing savagely. Now for the charge, we thought, for it
was considered an absolute certainty that a rhino cow
accompanied by its calf would always attack. We moved forward a
few yards, clapped our hands to show where we were, and their
attitude at once became more threatening. They rushed backward
and forward a couple of times and faced us again.

By this time we knew that they saw us and our fingers were
within the trigger guards. It was agreed that, if they charged,
they should be allowed to come within forty feet before we
fired, thus giving the picture machine time to get a good
record. The situation was intense beyond description, and
seconds seemed hours. When they started trotting toward us we
thought the fatal moment had come, but instead of continuing
the “charge,” they swung around and trotted swiftly off in an
opposite direction. As far as we could see them they trotted
swiftly and with the lightness of deer, sometimes zigzagging
their course, but always away from us. The charge had failed in
spite of all our efforts to provoke it. The whistling and
hand-clapping which we had hoped would give them our location
without doubt had merely served to tell them the way not to
go.

The moving picture record of a “charging rhino” would have
been a brilliant success but for one thing—the rhino refused
to charge.

During the following ten days we made many similar attempts
to get a charge and always with nearly the same results. Once
or twice we got within thirty yards before they finally turned
tail after a number of feints that looked much like the
beginning of a nasty charge. It was always intensely thrilling
work because there was the likelihood that we might get a
charge in spite of the fact that a dozen or so previous
experiences had failed to precipitate one.

In several cases the first rush of the rhino was toward us,
but instead of continuing, he would soon swing about and make
off, four times as badly scared as we were. It seemed as though
these preliminary rushes toward us were efforts to verify the
location of danger in order to determine the right direction
for escape. In all, we made between fifteen and twenty
different attempts on different rhinos to get a charge, but
with always practically the same result, yet with always the
same thrill of excitement and uncertainty.

The End of the Charge

Comprehensive statistics on a rhino’s charges are hard to
obtain. The district commissioner at Embo told me that he had
been ordered to reduce the number of rhinos in his district in
the interest of public safety and that he had killed
thirty-five in all. Out of this number five charged him. That
would indicate that one rhino in seven will charge. Captain
Dickinson, in his book, Big Game Shooting on the
Equator, tells of a rhino that charged him so viciously
that he threw down his bedding roll and the rhino tossed it and
trampled it with great emphasis, after which it triumphantly
trotted away, elated probably in the thought that it had wiped
out its enemy. A number of fatalities are on record to prove
that the rhino is a dangerous beast at times, and so I must
conclude that the rhino experiences we had were exceedingly
lucky ones, and perhaps exceptional ones in that respect.

In only one instance was it necessary for us to kill a rhino
and even then it was done more in the interest of photography
than of urgent necessity. On our game licenses we were each
allowed to kill two rhinos, and as I wanted, one of the Tana
River variety it was arranged that I should try to get the
first big one with good horns. After a hunt of several hours we
found two of them together out on the slope of a long hill. Our
glasses showed that one of them was quite large and equipped
with a splendid front horn nearly two feet long and a rear horn
about a foot long. At the lower slope of the hill were two or
three trees that screened our approach so that we were easily
enabled to get within about one hundred and fifty yards of them
without danger of discovery. From the trees onward the country
was an open prairie for two or three miles.

Armed with a double-barreled cordite rifle and the
comforting reflection that the chances were seven to one that
the rhinos would not charge, I slowly advanced alone toward the
two rhinos. Behind me about fifty yards was the long range
camera and a second gun manned by Mr. Stephenson. When fifty
yards from the rhinos I stopped, but as no offensive tactics
were apparent in the camp of the enemy, I slowly walked forward
to thirty-five yards. Then they saw me. They faced me with what
seemed like an attitude of decided unfriendliness. Their tails
were up and they were snorting like steam engines. When the big
one started toward me I fired and it fell like a log. The other
one, instead of thundering away, according to expectations,
became more belligerent. It ran a few steps, then swung around,
and I felt certain that it was going to avenge the death of its
comrade. The camera brigade rushed forward, clapping their
hands to scare it away, as there was no desire to kill both of
the animals. But it refused to go. It would sometimes run a few
steps, then it would turn and come toward us. It was evidently
in a fighting mood, with no intention of deserting the field of
action. Finally by firing shots in the air and yelling noisily
it turned and dashed over the side of the hill. The photograph,
taken at the instant the big rhino was struck, was remarkably
dramatic and showed one rhino in an aggressive attitude and the
other just plunging down from the shot of the big bullet.

The front horn of the dead rhino was twenty and
three-quarters inches long and in many places the animal’s hide
was over an inch thick. Strips of this were cut off to make
whips, and a large section was removed to be made into a table
top. These table tops, polished and rendered translucent by the
curing processes, are beautiful as well as extremely
interesting. The rhino’s tongue is even more delicious to eat
than ox tongue and rhino tail soup is a great luxury on any
white man’s table; while the native porters consider rhino meat
the finest of any meat to be had in Africa. The conscience of
one who slays a rhino is somewhat appeased by the fact that a
hundred native porters will have a good square meal of
wholesome meat to help build up their systems.

A Real Rhino Charge

Our expedition sustained only one real rhino charge. One day
Mr. Stephenson stumbled on a big cow rhino that was lying in
the grass. The meeting was as unexpected to him as to her, and
before he could count five she was rushing headlong toward him.
He clapped his hands, whistled, and shouted to turn her course,
but she came on, snorting loudly and with head ready to impale
everything in its way. Stephenson did not want to kill her,
neither did he desire to be killed, so when all other means had
failed he fired a soft nose bullet into her shoulder in the
hope that it would turn her away without seriously hurting her.
The bullet seemed to have no effect and she did not change her
course in the slightest degree. By this time she was within a
short distance of Stephenson, who was obliged to run a few feet
and take refuge behind a tree.

The Sultan Looked Like an American Indian

In the Thorn Brush on the Tana

The Dummy Rhino

The gunbearers and porters, who had fled in all directions,
thought that Stephenson was caught, but the rhino, passing him
with only a small margin of five feet, continued thunderously
on her way. In a few yards she slowed down, and when last seen
was walking. She had evidently been hit very hard by the soft
nose bullet and was already showing signs of sickness. Suddenly
a terrific squealing made the party aware that the cow rhino
had been accompanied by a little rhino calf. The calf, only a
couple of weeks old, charged savagely at every one in sight and
every one in sight took refuge behind trees and bushes. Instead
of trying to escape, the animal turned and continued to attack
in all directions whenever a man showed himself. When a man
leaped behind a tree the calf would charge the tree with such
force that it would be hurled back several feet, only to spring
up and charge again. His squealing could be heard for a mile.
After a long time the porters succeeded in capturing it and
they conveyed it back to camp strung on a pole. If that little
rhino was any criterion of rhino pugnacity, then surely the
rhino is born with the instinctive impulse to charge and to
fight as savagely as any animal alive.

We fed our little pet rhino on milk and then swung it in a
comfortable hammock made of zebra skin. In this more or less
undignified fashion it was carried by eight strong porters to
Fort Hall, two marches away, where it lived only a week or ten
days and then, to our sorrow and regret, succumbed from lack of
proper nourishment.

Retiring in Favor of Rhino

Sometimes, when the safari is marching through bush
country, the rhino becomes an element of considerable anxiety;
An armed party must precede the caravan and clear the route of
rhinos, otherwise the porters are likely to be scattered by
threatened charges. It is no uncommon sight to see a crowd of
heavily laden porters drop their loads and shin up the nearest
tree in record time. Consequently, strong protective measures
are always demanded when a long train of unarmed natives is
moving through bush or scrub country where there are many
rhinos.

Favorite Way of Being Photographed

The lower Tana River country is admirably adapted to the
life habits of the rhinos. Formerly the district was well
settled by natives, but now, owing to the fever conditions
prevailing there, the natives have all moved away to more
wholesome places and only the forlorn remains of deserted
villages mark where former prosperity reigned. The country has
been abandoned to game, with the result that it has been
enormously increasing during the last few years. In addition to
the great numbers of rhinos there are big herds of buffalo,
enormous numbers of hippo in the river, and many small droves
of eland. Waterbuck, bushbuck, steinbuck, impalla, hartebeest
and zebra dwell in comparative immunity from danger and may be
seen in hundreds, grazing on the hills or in the woods that
fringe the river. It is a sportsman’s paradise, if he manages
to escape the fever, and we enjoyed it tremendously, even
though we shot only a hundredth part of what we might easily
have shot. The charm of hunting in such a region lies in what
one sees rather than in what one kills.

CHAPTER VIII

MEETING COLONEL ROOSEVELT IN THE UTTERMOST OUTPOST OF
SEMI-CIVILIZATION. HE TALKS OF MANY THINGS, HEARS THAT HE HAS
BEEN REPORTED DEAD, AND PROMPTLY PLANS AN ELEPHANT HUNT

After one has been in British East
Africa two months he begins to readjust his preconceived ideas
to fit real conditions. He discovers that nothing is really as
bad as he feared it would be, and that distance, as usual, has
magnified the terrors of a far-away land. In spite of the fact
that he is in the heart of a primitive country, surrounded by
native tribes that still are mystified by a glass mirror, and
perhaps many days’ march from the nearest white person, he
still may feel that he is in touch with the great world
outside. His mail reaches him somehow or other, even if he is
in the center of some vast unsettled district devoid of roads
or trails.

How it is done is a mystery; but the fact remains that every
once in a while a black man appears as by magic and hands one a
package containing letters and telegrams. He is a native
“runner,” whose business it is to find you wherever you may be,
and he does it, no matter how long it may take him. A telegram
addressed to any sportsman in East Africa would reach him if
only addressed with his name and the words “British East
Africa.” There are only four or five thousand white residents
in the whole protectorate, and the names of these are duly
catalogued and known to the post-office officials both in
Mombasa and Nairobi.

In the Forest

If a strange name appears on a letter or despatch, inquiries
are made and the identity of the stranger is quickly
established. If he is a sportsman, the outfitters in Nairobi
will know who he is. They will have equipped him with porters
and the other essentials of a caravan, and they will know
exactly in which section of the protectorate he is hunting. So
the letter is readdressed in care of the boma or
government station, nearest to that section. The letter duly
arrives at the boma, and a native runner is told to go
out and deliver the message. He starts off, and by inquiry of
other natives and by relying on a natural instinct that is
little short of marvelous he ultimately finds the object of his
search and delivers his message.

If you look at a map of British East Africa you will be
amazed at the number of names that are marked upon it. You
would quite naturally think that the country was rather thickly
settled, whereas in fact there are very few places of
settlement away from the single line of railroad that runs from
Mombasa to Victoria Nyanza. The protectorate is divided into
subdistricts, each one of which has a capital, or
boma, as it is called. This boma usually
consists of a white man’s residence, a little post-office, one
or two Indian stores where all the necessities of a simple life
may be procured, and a number of native grass huts. There is
usually a small detachment of askaris, or native soldiers, who
are necessary to enforce the law, repress any native uprising,
and collect the hut tax of one dollar a year that is imposed
upon each household in the district.

Other names on the map may look important, but will prove to
be only streams, or hills, or some landmarks that have been
used by the surveyors to signify certain places. In our five
weeks’ trip through Trans-Tanaland we found only two
bomas, Fort Hall and Embo, and three or four ranches
where one or more white men lived. In our expedition to Mount
Elgon we encountered only two places where the mark of
civilization showed—Eldoma Ravine and Sergoi. In the former
place the only white man was the subcommissioner, and in the
latter there was one policeman, and a general store kept by a
South African. A number of Boer settlers are scattered over the
plateau, trying to reclaim little sections of land from its
primitive state.

Between Sergoi and Londiani, on the railroad, ninety miles
south, there is one little store where caravans may buy food
for porters and some of the simpler necessities that white men
may require. All the rest of the country for thousands of
square miles is given up to the lion and zebra and the vast
herds of antelope that feed upon the rich grass of the
plateau.

Yet in spite of the sparsity of settlement the native runner
manages to find you, even after days of traveling, without
compass or directions to aid him.

An Askari Who Looked Like a Tragedian

Mr. Akeley

Hunters who come to East Africa usually are sent to certain
districts where game is known to be abundant. These districts
are well defined and oftentimes there may be a number of
safaris in them at the same time, but so large are the
districts that one group of hunters very rarely encroaches upon
the others.

Some parties are sent to Mount Kilima-Njaro, in the vicinity
of which there is good hunting. Others are sent out from points
along the railroad for certain classes of game that may be
found only in those spots. Simba, on the railroad, is a
favorite place for those who are after the yellow-maned or
“plains” lion. Muhorini, also on the railroad, is a favorite
place for those who want the roan antelope; Naivasha is a good
place for hippo, and south of Kijabe, in what is called the
Sotik, is a district where nearly all sorts of game abound. The
Tana River is a favorite place for rhino, buffalo, nearly all
sorts of antelope, and some lion; Mount Kenia is an elephant
hunting ground, and the Aberdare Range, between Kenia and
Naivasha, also is good for elephant. North of Kenia is the Guas
Nyiro River, a rich district for game of many kinds. And so the
country is divided up into sections that are sure to attract
many sporting parties who desire certain kinds of game.

Our first expedition out from Nairobi was across the Athi
Plains to the Tana River and Mount Kenia, a wonderful trip for
those who are willing to take chances with the fever down the
Tana River. In five weeks we saw lion, rhino, buffalo, and
elephant—the four groups of animals that are called “royal
game”; also hippo, giraffe, eland, wildebeest, and many
varieties of smaller game. It is doubtful whether there is any
other section of East Africa where one could have a chance for
so many different species of game in such a short time as the
Tana River country.

For our second expedition we selected the Guas Ngishu
Plateau, the Nzoia River, and Mount Elgon. It is a long trip
which involves elaborate preparation and some difficulty in
keeping up supplies for the camp and the porters. It is the
most promising place, however, for black-maned lion and
elephant, and on account of these two capital prizes in the
lottery of big game hunting occasional parties are willing to
venture the time and expense necessary to reach this
district.

We disembarked, or “detrained,” as they say down there, at a
little station on the railroad called Londiani, eight miles
south of the equator and about eighty miles from Victoria
Nyanza. Then with two transport wagons drawn by thirty oxen,
our horses for “galloping” lions, and one hundred porters, we
marched north, always at an altitude of from seventy-five
hundred to ninety-two hundred feet, through vast forests that
stretched for miles on all sides. The country was beautiful
beyond words—clean, wholesome, and vast. In many places the
scenery was as trim, and apparently as finished as sections of
the wooded hills and meadows of Surrey. One might easily
imagine oneself in a great private estate where landscape
gardeners had worked for years.

One of the Transport Wagons

At night the cold was keen and four blankets were necessary
the night we camped two miles from the equator. In the day the
sun was hot in the midday hours, but never unpleasantly so.
After two days of marching through forests and across great
grassy folds in the earth we reached Eldoma Ravine, a
subcommissioner’s boma that looks for all the world
like a mountain health resort. From the hill upon which the
station is situated one may look across the Great Rift Valley,
two thousand feet below, and stretching away for miles across,
like a Grand Cañon of Arizona without any mountains in
it. Strong stone walls protect the white residence, for this is
a section of the country that has suffered much from native
uprisings during the last few years. We called on the solitary
white resident one evening, and, true to the creed of the
Briton, he had dressed for dinner. The sight of a man in a
dinner-coat miles from a white man and leagues from a white
woman was something to remember and marvel at.

Northward from Eldoma Ravine for days we marched, sometimes
in dense forests so thick that a man could scarcely force
himself through the undergrowth that flanked the trail, and
sometimes through upland meadows so deep in tall yellow grass
as to suggest a field of waving grain, then through miles of
country studded with the gnarled thorn tree that looks so much
like our apple trees at home. It was as though we were
traversing an endless orchard, clean, beautiful, and
exhilarating in the cool winds of the African highlands. And
then, all suddenly, we came to the end of the trees, and before
us, like a great, heaving yellow sea, lay the Guas Ngishu
Plateau that stretches northward one hundred miles and always
above seven thousand feet in altitude.

Far ahead, like a little knob of blue, was Sergoi Hill,
forty miles away, and beyond, in a fainter blue, were the hills
that mark the limit of white man’s passport. On the map that
district is marked: “Natives probably treacherous.” Off to the
left, a hundred miles away, the dim outline of Mount Elgon rose
in easy slopes from the horizon. Elgon, with its elephants, was
our goal, and in between were the black-maned lions that we
hoped to meet.

It would be hard to exaggerate the charm of this climate.
And yet this, one thought, was equatorial Africa, which, in the
popular imagination, is supposed to be synonymous with
torrential rains, malignant fevers, and dense jungles of matted
vegetation. It was more like the friendly stretches of Colorado
scenery at the time of year when the grasses of the valley are
dotted with flowers of many colors and the sun shines down upon
you with genial warmth.

A Night on the Equator

Each morning we marched ten or twelve miles and then went
into camp near some little stream. In the afternoon we hunted
for lions, beating out swamps, scouting every bit of cover and
combing the tall grass for hours at a time. Hartebeest, topi,
zebra, eland, oribi, reedbuck, and small grass antelope were
upon all sides and at all times.

The herds of zebra and hartebeest literally numbered
thousands, but, except as the latter were occasionally required
for food for the porters, we seldom tried to shoot them. Every
Boer settler we saw was interviewed and every promising lion
clue was followed to the bitter end, but without result.
Sometimes we remained in one camp a day or more in order to
search the lion retreats more thoroughly, but never a
black-maned lion was routed from his lair. A few weeks later,
when the dry grass had been burned to make way for new grass,
as is done each year, the chances would be greatly improved,
and we hoped for better luck when we retraced our steps from
Elgon in December. Before that time it would be like trying to
find a needle in a haystack to find a lion in the tall grass,
and a good deal more dangerous if we did find one. There were
lots of them there, but they were taking excellent care of
themselves. In July, three months previous, Mr. McMillan, Mr.
Selous, and Mr. Williams were in this same district after
black-maned lions. They heard them every night, but saw only
one in several weeks. This one, however, made a distinct
impression. Williams saw it one day and wounded it at two
hundred yards. The lion charged and could not be stopped by
Williams’ bullets. It was only after it had leaped on the
hunter and frightfully mauled him that the lion succumbed to
its wounds. And it was only after months of suffering that
Williams finally recovered from the mauling.

We felt that if Frederick Selous, the world’s greatest big
game hunter, could not find the lion, then our chances were
somewhat slim.

Lion Hunting in Tall Grass

There had been few parties in this district since McMillan’s
party left. Captain Ashton came in two months before us, and we
met him on his way out. With him was Captain Black, a
professional elephant hunter, who, three years before, on the
Aberdare, had had a bad experience with an elephant. It was a
cow that he had wounded but failed to kill. She charged him and
knocked him down in a pile of very thick and matted brush.
Three times she trampled him under her feet, but the bushes
served as a kind of mattress and the captain escaped with only
a few hones broken; although he was laid up for five weeks.
Ashton and Black did not have much luck in the present trip and
failed to get a single lion.

Two Spaniards passed our camp one day, inward bound. They
were the Duke of Peñaranda and Sr. de la Huerta, and
reported no lions during their few days in the district. Prince
Lichtenstein was also somewhere on the plateau, but we didn’t
run across him. In addition to these three parties and ours,
the only other expedition in the Guas Ngishu Plateau was
Colonel Roosevelt’s party, toward which, by previous agreement,
we made our way.

A number of months before Mr. Akeley, who headed our party,
was dining with President Roosevelt at the White House. In the
course of their talk, which was about Africa and Mr. Akeley’s
former African hunting and collecting experiences, the latter
had told the president about a group of elephants that he was
going to collect and mount for the American Museum of History
in New York. President Roosevelt was asked if he would
coöperate in the work, and he expressed a keen willingness
to do so. When our party arrived at Nairobi, in September, a
letter awaited Mr. Akeley, renewing Colonel Roosevelt’s desire
to help in collecting the group.

It was in answer to this invitation that Mr. Akeley and our
party had gone to the Mount Elgon country to meet Mr. Roosevelt
and carry out the elephant-hunting compact made many months
before at the White House.

Kermit, Leslie Tarlton and Colonel Roosevelt

Winding Through Unbroken Country

Our Safari on the March

Eleven days of marching and hunting from the railroad
brought us to Sergoi, the very uttermost outpost of
semi-civilization. Here we found another letter in which Mr.
Akeley was asked to come to the Roosevelt camp, and which
suggested that a native runner could pilot him to its
whereabouts. The letter had been written some days before and
had been for some time at Sergoi. Whether the Roosevelt camp
had been moved in the meantime could not be determined at
Sergoi, and we knew only in a general way that it was probably
somewhere on the Nzoia River (pronounced Enzoya), two or three
days’ march west of Sergoi, toward Mount Elgon.

So we started across, meeting no natives who possibly could
have given any information. On the afternoon of November
thirteenth we went into camp on the edge of a great swamp, or
tinga-tinga, as the natives call it, only a couple of
hours’ march from the river. Many fresh elephant trails had
been discovered, and the swamp itself looked like a most
promising place for lions. A great tree stood on one side of
the swamp, and in its branches was a platform which an
Englishman had occupied seven nights in a vain quest for lions
some time before. A little grass shelter was below the tree,
and as we approached a Wanderobo darted out and ran in terror
from us. The Wanderobos are native hunters who live in the
forests, and are as shy as wild animals. So we could not
question him as to Colonel Roosevelt’s camp. Later in the
afternoon a native runner appeared from the direction of Sergoi
with a message to the colonel, but he didn’t know where the
camp was and didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to find out.
He calmly made himself the guest of one of our porters and
spent the night in our camp, doing much more sitting than
running.

On the morning of the fourteenth we marched toward the
river, two hours away, the native runner slowly ambling along
with us. We had been on the trail about an hour and a half when
a shot was heard off to our left; At first we thought it was
our Spanish friends, but a few moments later we came to a point
where we could see, about a mile away, a long string of porters
winding along in the direction from which we came, it was
plainly a much larger safari than the Spanish one, and
we at once concluded that it was Colonel Roosevelt’s.

Three or four men on horses were visible, but could not be
recognized with our glasses. The number corresponded to the
colonel’s party, however, which we knew to consist of himself
and Kermit, Edmund Heller and Leslie Tarlton. A messenger was
sent across the hills to establish their identity and we
marched on to the river, a half-hour farther, where we found
the smoldering fires of their camp.

A transport wagon of supplies for the Duke of
Peñaranda’s safari was also there, and from the
drivers it was definitely learned that the late occupants of
the camp were Mr. Roosevelt and his party. In the meantime the
messenger had reached Colonel Roosevelt, and when the latter
learned that Mr. Akeley’s safari was in the vicinity
he at once ordered camp pitched forty-five minutes from our
camp, and started across to see Akeley. The latter had also
started across to see the colonel, and they met on the way. And
during all this time the native runner with the message to
Colonel Roosevelt was loafing the morning away in our camp.
What the message might be, of course, we didn’t know, but we
hoped that it was nothing of importance. It was only when the
colonel and his party reached our camp that the message was
delivered. As we stood talking and congratulating everybody on
how well he was looking the colonel casually opened the
message.

He seemed amused, and somewhat surprised, and at once read
it aloud to us. It was from America, and said: “Reported here
you have been killed. Mrs. Roosevelt worried. Cable denial
American Embassy, Rome.” It was dated November sixth, eight
days before.

“I think I might answer that by saying that the report is
premature,” he said, laughing, and then told the story of a
Texas man who had commented on a similar report in the same
words.

Colonel Roosevelt certainly didn’t look dead. If ever a man
looked rugged and healthy and in splendid physical condition he
certainly did on the day that this despatch reached him. His
cheeks were burned to a ruddy tan and his eyes were as clear as
a plainsman’s. He laughed and joked and commented on the news
that we told him with all the enthusiasm of one who knows no
physical cares or worries.

Reading the Report That He Had Been Killed

“If I could have seen you an hour and a half ago,” he told
Akeley, “I could have got you the elephants you want for your
group. We passed within only a few yards of a herd of ten this
morning, and Kermit got within thirty yards to make some
photographs.” They had not shot any, however, as they had
received no answer to the letter sent several days before to
Mr. Akeley and consequently did not know positively that his
party had reached the plateau.

The colonel asked about George Ade, commented vigorously and
with prophetic insight on the Cook-Peary controversy, and read
aloud, in excellent dialect, a Dooley article on the subject,
which I had saved from an old copy of the Chicago
Tribune. He commented very frankly, with no semblance
at hypocrisy, on Mr. Harriman’s death, told many of his
experiences in the hunting field, and for three hours, at lunch
and afterward, he talked with the freedom of one who was glad
to see some American friends in the wilderness and who had no
objection to showing his pleasure at such a meeting.

He talked about the tariff and about many public men and
public questions with a frankness that compels even a newspaper
man to regard as being confidential. Our safari was
the only one he had met in the field since he had been in
Africa, and it was evident that the efforts of the protectorate
officials to save him from interference and intrusion had been
successful.

Arrangements were then made for an elephant hunt. Colonel
Roosevelt was working on schedule time, and had planned to be
in Sergoi on the seventeenth. He agreed to a hunt that should
cover the fifteenth, sixteenth, and possibly the seventeenth,
trusting that they might be successful in this period and that
a hard forced march could get him to Sergoi on the night of the
eighteenth.

It was arranged that he and Mr. Akeley, with Kermit and
Tarlton and one tent should start early the next morning on the
hunt, trusting to luck in overtaking the herd that he had seen
in the morning. The hunt was enormously successful, and the
adventures they had were so interesting that they deserve a
separate chapter.

CHAPTER IX

THE COLONEL READS MACAULAY’S “ESSAYS,” DISCOURSES ON MANY
SUBJECTS WITH GREAT FRANKNESS, DECLINES A DRINK OF SCOTCH
WHISKY, AND KILLS THREE ELEPHANTS

On the afternoon of November
fourteenth, a little cavalcade of horsemen might have been seen
riding slowly away from our camp on the Nzoia River. One of
them, evidently the leader, was a well-built man of about
fifty-one years, tanned by many months of African hunting and
wearing a pair of large spectacles. His teeth flashed in the
warm sunlight. A rough hunting shirt encased his well-knit body
and a pair of rougher trousers, reinforced with leather knee
caps and jointly sustained by suspenders and a belt, fitted in
loose folds around his stocky legs. On his head was a big sun
helmet, and around his waist, less generous in amplitude than
formerly, was a partly filled belt of Winchester cartridges.
His horse was a stout little Abyssinian shooting pony, gray of
color and lean in build, and in the blood-stained saddle-bag
was a well-worn copy of Macaulay’s Essays, bound in
pigskin. Our hero—for it was he—was none other than Bwana
Tumbo, the hunter-naturalist, exponent of the strenuous life,
and ex-president of the United States.

Improving Each Shining Hour

If I were writing a thrilling story of adventure that is the
way this story would begin. But as this is designed to be a
simple chronicle of events, it is just as well at once to get
down to basic facts and tell about the Roosevelt elephant hunt,
the hyena episode, and the pigskin library, together with other
more or less extraneous matter.

A Flag Flew Over the Colonel’s Tent

Kermit and Mr. Stephenson Diagnosing the Case

Colonel Roosevelt, his son Kermit, Leslie Tarlton, who is
managing the Roosevelt expedition, and Edmund Heller, the
taxidermist of the expedition, came to our camp on the
fourteenth of November to have luncheon and to talk over plans
whereby Colonel Roosevelt was to kill one or more elephants for
Mr. Akeley’s American museum group of five or six elephants.
The details were all arranged and later in the afternoon the
colonel and his party left for their own camp, only a short
distance from ours.

Mr. Akeley, with one of our tents and about forty porters,
followed later in the evening and spent the night at the
Roosevelt camp. The following morning Colonel Roosevelt, Mr.
Akeley, Mr. Tarlton and Kermit, with two tents and forty
porters and gunbearers, started early in the hope of again
finding the trail of the small herd of elephants that had been
seen the day before. The trail was picked up after a short time
and the party of hunters expected that it would be a long and
wearisome pursuit, for it was evident that the elephants had
become nervous and were moving steadily along without stopping
to feed. In such cases they frequently travel forty or fifty
miles before settling down to quiet feeding again.

The country was hilly, deep with dry grass, and badly cut up
with small gullies and jagged out-croppings of rock on the low
ridges. At all times the ears of the hunting party were alert
for any sound that would indicate the proximity of the herd,
but for several hours no trumpeting, nor intestinal rumbling,
nor crash of tusks against small trees were heard. Finally, at
about eleven o’clock, Tarlton, who, strangely enough, is partly
deaf, heard a sound that caused the hunting party to stop
short. He heard elephants. They were undoubtedly only a short
distance ahead, but as the wind was from their direction there
was little likelihood that they had heard the approach of the
hunters. So Tarlton, who has had much experience in elephant
hunting, led the party off at a right angle from the elephant
trail and then, turning, paralleled the trail a few hundred
feet away. They had gone only a short distance when it became
evident that they had passed the herd, which was hidden by the
tall grass and the thickly-growing scrub trees that grew on all
sides.

The wooded character of the country rendered it easy to
stalk the elephant herd, and with careful attention to the
wind, the four hunters and their gunbearers advanced under
cover until the elephants could be seen and studied. Each of
the four hunters carried a large double-barreled cordite rifle
that fires a five-hundred-grain bullet, backed up by nearly a
hundred grains of cordite.

As was expected, the herd consisted solely of cows and
calves. There were eight cow elephants and two totos,
or calves, a circumstance that was particularly fortunate, as
Colonel Roosevelt was expected to secure one or two cows for
the group, while some one else was to get the calf.

For some moments the hunting party studied the group of
animals and finally decided which ones were the best for the
group.

Two of the largest cows and the calf of one of them were
selected. It is always the desire of collectors who kill groups
of animals for museums to kill the calf and the mother at the
same time whenever practicable, so that neither one is left to
mourn the loss of the other. It is one of the unpleasant
features of group collecting that calves must be killed, but
the collector justifies himself in the thought that many
thousands of people will be instructed and interested in the
group when it is finished.

Elephant hunting is considered by many African hunters as
being the most dangerous of all hunting. When a man is wounded
by an elephant he is pretty likely to die, whereas the wounds
inflicted by lions are often not necessarily mortal ones. Also,
in fighting a wounded lion one may sometimes take refuge in the
low branches of a tree, but with a wounded elephant there is
rarely time to climb high enough and quick enough to escape the
frenzied animal. In elephant shooting, also, the hunter
endeavors to approach within twenty or thirty yards, so that
the bullets may be placed exactly where their penetration will
be the most instantaneously deadly. Consequently, a badly
placed bullet may merely infuriate the elephant without giving
the hunter time to gain a place of safety, and thus be much
worse than if the hunter had entirely missed his mark.

Among elephant hunters it is considered more dangerous to
attack a cow elephant than a bull, for the cow is always ready
and eager to defend its calf, hence when Colonel Roosevelt
prepared to open fire on a cow elephant, accompanied by a calf,
at a range of thirty yards, in a district where the highest
tree was within reach of an elephant’s trunk, the situation was
one fraught with tense uncertainty.

Colonel Roosevelt is undoubtedly a brave man. The men who
have hunted with him in Africa say that he has never shown the
slightest sign of fear in all the months of big game hunting
that they have done together. He “holds straight,” as they say
in shooting parlance, and at short range, where his eyesight is
most effective, he shoots accurately.

This, then, was the dramatic situation at about twelve
o’clock noon on November fifteenth, eight miles east of the
Nzoia River, near Mount Elgon: Eight cow elephants, two
totos, one ex-president with a double-barreled cordite
rifle thirty yards away, supported by three other hunters
similarly armed, with native gunbearers held in the rear as a
supporting column.

The colonel opened fire; the biggest cow dropped to her
knees and in an instant the air was thunderous with the excited
“milling” of the herd of elephants. For several anxious minutes
the spot was the scene of much confusion, and when quiet was
once more restored Colonel Roosevelt had killed three elephants
and Kermit had killed one of the calves. It had not been
intended or desired to kill more than two of the cows, but with
a herd of angry elephants threatening to annihilate an
attacking party, sometimes the prearranged plans do not work
out according to specifications.

Kermit was hastily despatched to notify our camp and the
work of preparing the skins of the elephants was at once
begun.

In the meantime, we at our camp, eight miles away from the
scene of battle, were waiting eagerly for news of the hunting
party, although expecting nothing for a day of so. It seemed
too much to expect that the hunt should have such a quick and
successful termination. So when Kermit rode in with the news
late in the afternoon it was a time for felicitation. We all
solemnly took a drink, which in itself was an event, for our
camp was a “dry” camp when in the field. Only the killing of a
lion had been sufficient provocation for taking off the “lid,”
but on the strength of three elephants for the group the “lid”
was momentarily raised with much ceremony and circumstance.

The burden of Kermit’s message was “salt, salt, salt!” and
porters and second gunbearers to help with the skinning. So
James L. Clark, who has been connected with the American Museum
of History for some time and who was with us on the Mount Elgon
trip to help Mr. Akeley with the preparation of the group,
started off with a lot of porters laden with salt for
preserving the skins. It was his plan to go direct to the main
Roosevelt camp, get a guide, and then push on to the elephant
camp, where he hoped to arrive by ten o’clock at night. He
would then be in time to help with the skinning, which we
expected would be continued throughout the entire night. Kermit
stopped at his own camp and gave Clark a guide for the rest of
the journey, after which he went to bed.

At eleven o’clock the sound of firing was heard some place
off in the darkness. The night guard of the Roosevelt camp,
rightly construing it to be a signal, answered it with a shot,
and, guided by the latter, Clark and his party of salt-laden
porters once more appeared. They had traveled in a circle for
three hours and were hopelessly lost. Kermit was routed out and
again supplied more guides—also a compass and also the
direction to follow. Unfortunately he made a mistake and said
northwest instead of southeast—otherwise his directions were
perfect.

For three hours more Clark and his porters went bumping
through the night, stumbling through the long grass and falling
into hidden holes. The porters began to be mutinous and the
guides were thoroughly and hopelessly lost. It was then that
they one and all laid down in the tall grass, made a fire to
keep the lions and leopards away, and slept soundly until
daylight. Even then the situation was little better, for the
guides were still at sea. About the time that Clark decided, to
return to the river, miles away, and take a fresh start, he
fired a shot in the forlorn hope of getting a response from
some section of the compass. A distant shot came in answer and
he pushed on and soon came up with the colonel and Tarlton
returning home after a night in the temporary elephant camp.
The colonel gave him full directions and at nine o’clock the
relief party arrived at their destination.

In the meantime we, Mrs. Akeley, Stephenson and myself, had
left our camp on the river at six-fifteen, gone to the
Roosevelt camp, and with Kermit guiding us proceeded on across
country toward the elephant camp. On our way we also met the
colonel and Tarlton, the former immensely pleased with the
outcome of the hunt and full of enthusiasm about the adventure
with the elephants. But the most remarkable thing of all, he
said, was the hyena incident. He told us the story, and it is
surely one that will make all nature fakers sit up in an
incredulous and dissenting mood.

During the night, the story goes, many hyenas had come from
far and near to gorge on the carcasses of the elephants. Their
howls filled the night with weird sounds. Lions also journeyed
to the feast, and between the two they mumbled the bones of the
slain with many a howl and snarl. Early in the morning the
colonel went out in the hope of surprising a lion at the
spread. Instead, to his great amazement, he saw the head of a
hyena protruding from the distended side of the largest
elephant. It was inside the elephant and was looking out, as
through a window. A single shot finished the hyena, after which
a more careful examination was made.

There are two theories as to what really happened. One is
that the hyena ate its way into the inside of the elephant,
then gorged itself so that its stomach was distended to such
proportions that it couldn’t get through the hole by which it
had entered the carcass.

The Hyena Episode

The other theory is that, after eating its way into the
elephant, it started to eat its way out by a different route.
When its head emerged the heavy muscles of the elephant’s side
inclosed about its neck like a vise, entrapping the hyena as
effectively as though it had its head in a steel trap. In the
animal’s despairing efforts to escape it had kicked one leg out
through the thick walls of the elephant’s side.

Kermit Roosevelt

“Peeling” an elephant

The colonel, in parting, asked us to stop with him for lunch
on our way back and he would tell us all about the elephant
hunt and show us his pigskin library. In return we promised to
photograph the hyena and thus be prepared to render expert
testimony in case, some time in the future, he might get into a
controversy with the nature fakers as to the truth of the
incident.

We then resumed our journey and arrived at the elephant camp
at nine-thirty. It was a scene of industry. The skins of the
two largest elephants and that of the calf had been removed the
afternoon before and were spread out under a cluster of trees.
Twenty or thirty porters were squatted around the various ears
and strips of hide and massive feet, paring off all the little
particles of flesh or tissue that remained. As fast as a
section of hide was stripped it was thickly covered with salt
and rolled up. This is the preliminary step. Afterwards the
skin, in many places an inch in thickness, is pared down to a
condition of pliable thinness. This work requires hours or even
days of hard labor by many skilful wielders of the paring
knife. The skulls and many of the bones are saved when an
animal is being preserved for a museum, but when we arrived
they had not yet been removed from the carcasses.

Our first object was to visit the hyena, which we found
still protruding from the side of his tomb. We photographed him
from all angles, after which he was disinterred and exposed to
full view. He had certainly died happy. He had literally eaten
himself to death, and his body was so distended from gorging
that it was as round as a ball. Colonel Roosevelt also
photographed it, so that there will be no lack of evidence if
the incident ever reaches the controversial stage.

The third cow killed by Colonel Roosevelt was too small for
the group, so the skin was divided up as souvenirs of the day.
We each got a foot, fifteen square feet of skin, and one of the
ears was saved for the colonel.

We then started on the long two hours’ ride back to the
Roosevelt camp, arriving there at a few minutes before one
o’clock. We had not been in camp ten minutes before a whirlwind
came along, blew down a tent, and in another minute was
gone.

A big American flag was flying from the colonel’s tent, and
he came out and, greeted us with the utmost cordiality and
warmth. In honor of the occasion he had put on his coat and a
green knit tie. He was beaming with pleasure at the result of
the elephant hunt and seemed proud that he was to have
elephants in the American Museum group to be done by Mr.
Akeley. Heller was stuffing some birds and mice and was as
slouchy, deliberate and as full of dry humor as any one I’ve
ever seen. He is a character of a most likable type. Tarlton,
small, with short cropped red hair—a sort of Scotchman in
appearance—is also a remarkable type. He has a quiet voice,
never raised in tone, and talks like the university man that he
is. He is a famous lion hunter and has killed numbers of lions
and elephants, but now he says he is through with dangerous
game.

“I’ve had enough of it,” he says.

The colonel, Tarlton, Heller, and Kermit were the only
members of the expedition present, Mearns and Loring having
been engaged in a separate mission up in the Kenia country for
several weeks, while Cuninghame had gone to Uganda to make
preparations for the future operations of the party in that
country.

Mrs. Akeley washed up in the colonel’s tent, while
Stephenson and I used Kermit’s tent, and as we washed and
scrubbed away the memories of the elephant carcasses the
colonel stood in the door and talked to us.

We told him that each of us had taken a drink of Scotch
whisky the evening before in honor of the elephants—the first
drinks we had taken for weeks.

“I’d do the same,” said the colonel, “but I don’t like
Scotch whisky. As a matter of fact, I have taken only three
drinks of brandy since I’ve been in Africa, twice when I was
exhausted and once when I was feeling a little feverish. Before
I left Washington there were lots of people saying that I was a
drunkard, and that I could never do any work until I had
emptied a bottle or two of liquor.”

We told him that we had heard these rumors frequently during
the closing months of his administration, and he laughed.

“I never drank whisky,” he said; “not from principle, but
because I don’t like it. I seldom drink wine, because I’m
rather particular about the kind of wine I drink. We have some
champagne with us, but the thought of drinking hot champagne in
this country is unpleasant. Sometimes, when I can get wines
that just suit my taste, I drink a little, but never much. The
three drinks of brandy are all I’ve had in Africa, and I’m sure
that I’ve not taken one in the last four months. They had all
sorts of stories out about me before I left Washington—that I
was drinking hard and that I was crazy. I may be crazy,” he
said, laughing, “but I most certainly haven’t been drinking
hard.”

The luncheon was a merry affair. Heller had been out in the
swamp in front of the camp and had shot some ducks for
luncheon.

“On my way in,” said the colonel, “I shot an oribi, but when
I heard that Heller had shot some ducks I knew that my oribi
would not be served.”

It was evident that the most thorough good fellowship
existed among the members of the colonel’s party. His fondness
for all of them was in constant evidence—in the way he joked
with them and in the complete absence of restraint in their
attitude toward him.

“They were told that I would be a hard man to get along with
in the field,” Colonel Roosevelt said, “but we’ve had a
perfectly splendid time together.”

I asked him whether he had been receiving newspapers, and,
if not, whether he would like to see some that I had received
from home. He answered that he had not seen any and really
didn’t want to see any.

“I don’t believe in clinging to the tattered shreds of
former greatness,” he said, laughing.

He had not heard that Governor Johnson, of Minnesota, had
died, and when we told him he said that Johnson would
undoubtedly have been the strongest presidential candidate the
Democrats could have nominated the next time. He wanted to know
where he could address a note of sympathy to Mrs. Johnson.

Later, in speaking of a prominent public man who loudly
disclaimed responsibility for an act committed by a
subordinate, he said:

“It would have been far better to have said nothing about
it, but let people think he himself had given the order. Very
often subordinates say and do things that are credited to their
superiors, and it is never good policy to try to shift the
blame. Do you remember the time Root was in South America?
Well, some president down there sent me a congratulatory
telegram which reached Washington when I was away. Mr. —— of
the state department answered it in my name and said that I and
‘my people’ were pleased with the reception they were giving
Mr. Root. Well, the New York Sun took the matter up
and when the fleet went around the world they referred to it as
‘my fleet,’ and that ‘my fleet’ had crossed ‘my equator’ four
times and ‘my ocean’ a couple of times. It was very cleverly
done and some people began to call for a Brutus to curb my
imperialistic tendencies.”

Writing His Adventures While They’re Hot

He told a funny story about John L. Sullivan, who came to
the White House to intercede for a nephew who had got into
trouble in the navy. John L. told what a nice woman the boy’s
mother was and what a terrible disgrace it would be for himself
and his family if the boy was dropped from the navy. “Why, if
he hadn’t gone into the navy he might have turned out very
bad,” said John L.; “taken up music or something like
that.”

We also told him that some of the American papers were
keeping score on the game he had killed, and that whenever the
cable reported a new victim the score up to date would be
published like a base-ball percentage table. In the last report
he was quoted as having killed seven lions, while Kermit had
killed ten. This seemed to amuse him very much, although the
figures were not strictly accurate. His score was nine and
Kermit’s eight up to date. He was also amused by the habit the
American papers have of calling him “Bwana Tumbo,” which means
“The Master with the Stomach,” a title that did not fit him
nearly so appropriately then as it might have done before he
began his active days in the hunting field. He said, so far as
he knew, the porters called him “Bwana Mkubwa,” which means
“Great Master,” and is applied to the chief man of a
safari, regardless of who or what he is. It is merely
a title that is always used to designate the boss. We told him
that many natives we had met would invariably refer to him as
the Sultana Mkubwa, or Great Sultan, because they had heard
that he was a big chief from America.

He also laughingly quoted the attitude of Wall Street as
expressed in the statement that they “hoped every lion would do
his duty.”

Later, in speaking generally of the odd experiences he had
had in Africa, he spoke of one that will surely be regarded as
a nature fake when he tells it. It was an experience that he
and Cuninghame had with a big bull giraffe which they
approached as it slept. When they were within ten feet of it it
opened its eyes and stared at them. A slight movement on their
part caused it to strike out with its front foot, but without
rising. Then, as they made no offensive moves, it continued to
regard them sleepily and without fear. Even when they threw
sticks at it it refused to budge, and it was only after some
time that it was chased away, where it came to a stop only
fifty yards off.

“I suppose W.J. Long will call that a nature fake,” he said,
“and I wish that I had had a camera with me so that I could
have photographed it. I’m afraid they won’t believe Cuninghame,
because they don’t know him.”

In the course of the luncheon the conversation ranged from
politics, public men, his magazine work, some phases of
Illinois politics, as involved in the recent senatorial
election, his future plans of the present African trip and many
of the little experiences he had had since arriving in the
country. Much that was said was of such frankness, particularly
as to public men, as to be obviously confidential.

Kermit Led the Way to the Elephant Camp

The Elephants’ Skulls Were Saved

Removing an Elephant’s Skin

He was asked whether he had secured, among his trophies, any
new species of animal that might be named after him. In Africa
there is a custom of giving the discoverer’s name to any new
kind or class of animal that is killed. For instance, the name
“granti” is applied to the gazelle first discovered by the
explorer Grant. “Thompsoni” is applied to the gazelle
discovered by Thompson. “Cokei” is the name given the
hartebeest discovered by Coke, and so on. If Colonel Roosevelt
had discovered a new variation of any of the species it would
be called the “Roosevelti ——.”

The colonel said that he had not discovered any new animals,
but that Heller, he thought, had found some new variety of
mouse or mole on Mount Kenia. He supposed that it would be
called the Mole Helleri.

He then told about an exciting adventure they had with a
hippo two nights before. Away in the night the camp was aroused
by screams coming from the big swamp in front. Kongoni, his
gunbearer, rushed in and shouted: “Lion eat porter!” The
colonel grabbed his gun and dashed out in the darkness. Kermit
and one or two others, hastily armed, also appeared, and they
charged down the swamp, where a hippo had made its appearance
in the neighborhood of a terrified porter. Kermit dimly made
out the hippo and shot at it, but it disappeared and could not
be found again.

After luncheon the colonel said, “Now, I want to inflict my
pigskin library on you,” and together we went into his tent and
he opened an oilcloth-covered, aluminum-lined case that was
closely packed with books, nearly all of which were bound in
pigskin. It was a present from his sister, Mrs. Douglas
Robinson. The tent was lined with red, evidently Kermit’s
darkroom when he was developing pictures. A little table stood
at the open flaps of the entrance and upon it were writing
materials, with which Mr. Roosevelt already had started to
write up the elephant hunt of the day before. His motto seems
to be, “Do it now, if not sooner.”

The Pigskin Library

I sat on his cot, Mrs. Akeley on a small tin trunk, and
Stephenson on another. The colonel squatted down on the floor
cloth of the tent and began to show us one by one the various
literary treasures from his pigskin library. The whole box of
books was so designed that it weighed only sixty pounds, and
was thus within the limit of a porter’s load. Some of the books
were well stained from frequent use and from contact with the
contents of his saddle-bags. Whenever he went on a hunt he
carried one or more of these little volumes, which he would
take out and read from time to time when there was nothing else
to do. He never seemed to waste a moment.

His pride in the library was evident, and the fondness with
which he brought forth the books was the fondness of an honest
enthusiast.

“Some people don’t consider Longfellow a great poet, but I
do,” he said, as he showed a little volume of the poet’s works.
“Lowell is represented here, but I think, toward the end of his
life, he became too much Bostonian. The best American,” he said
later, “is a Bostonian who has lived ten years west of the
Mississippi.”

He then showed us his work-box, a compact leather case
containing pads of paper, pens, lead pencils, and other
requirements of the writer. I did not see a type-writing
machine such as we cartoonists have so often represented in our
cartoons of Mr. Roosevelt in Africa. But, then, cartoonists are
not always strictly accurate.

Later on he spoke of the lectures he was to deliver in
Berlin, at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in Oxford the following
spring. I told him how surprised I had been to hear that he had
prepared these lectures during the rush of the last few weeks
of his administration. He said that he probably would be
regarded as a representative American in those lectures and
that he wanted to do them just as well as he possibly could. He
knew that there would be no time nor library references in
Africa, and so he had prepared them in Washington before
leaving America.

In regard to his future movements he seemed sorry that he
was obliged to take the Nile trip, and that he was only doing
it as a matter of business—that he had to get a white rhino,
which is found only along certain parts of the Nile.

“Going back by the Nile is a long and hard trip. For the
first twelve days we will not fire a shot, probably. It will
mean getting started every morning at three o’clock, marching
until ten, then sweating under mosquito bars during the heat of
the day, with spirillum ticks, sleeping-sickness flies, and all
sorts of pests to bother one; then long days on the Nile, with
nothing to see but papyrus reeds on each side.”

And speaking of “rhinos” suggests a little incident that the
colonel told and which he considers amusing.

“One day one of the party was stalking a buffalo, when a
rhino suddenly appeared some distance away and threatened to
charge or do something that would alarm the buffalo and scare
it away. So they told me to hurry down and shoo the rhino off
while they finished their stalk and got the buffalo. So, you
see, there’s an occupation. That settles the question as to
what shall we do with our ex-presidents. They can be used to
scare rhinos away.”

On hearing this story I remembered that the thick-skinned
rhino is sometimes used by cartoonists as a symbol for “the
trusts,” and the story seemed doubly appropriate as applied to
this particular ex-president.

Some member of our party then modestly advanced the
suggestion that the colonel might some day be back in the White
House again. He laughed and said that the kaleidoscope never
repeats.

“They needn’t worry about what to do with this
ex-president,” he said. “I have work laid out for a long time
ahead.”

Another member of our party then told about the Roosevelt
act in The Follies of 1909, in one part of which some
one asks Kermit (in the play) where the “ex-president” is. “You
mean the ‘next president,’ don’t you?” says Kermit. When
Colonel Roosevelt heard this he was immensely interested, not
so much in the words of the play, but in the fact that Kermit
had been represented on the stage—dramatized, as it were.

And as we left for our own camp the colonel called out:
“Now, don’t forget. Just as soon as we all get back to America
we’ll have a lion dinner together at my house.”

CHAPTER X

ELEPHANT HUNTING NOT AN OCCASION FOR LIGHTSOME MERRYMAKING.
FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES OF FOREST IN WHICH THE KENIA
ELEPHANT LIVES, WANDERS AND BRINGS UP HIS CHILDREN

The peril and excitement of elephant
hunting can not be realized by any one who has known only the
big, placid elephants of the circus, or fed peanuts to a
gentle-eyed pachyderm in the park. To the person thus
circumscribed in his outlook, the idea of killing an elephant
and calling it sport is little short of criminal. It would seem
like going out in the barnyard and slaying a friendly old
family horse.

That was my point of view before I went to Africa, but later
experiences caused the point of view to shift considerably. If
any one thinks that elephant hunting is an occasion for
lightsome merrymaking he had better not meet the African
elephant in the rough. Most people are acquainted with only the
Indian elephant, the kind commonly seen in captivity, and judge
from him that the elephant is a sort of semi-domesticated beast
of burden, like the camel and the ox. Yet the Indian elephant
is about as much like his African brother as a tomcat is like a
tiger.

The Hyenas Had Feasted Well

Great Stretches of Dense Forest

Many African hunters consider elephant hunting more
dangerous than lion, rhino, or buffalo hunting, any one of
which can hardly be called an indoor sport. These are the four
animals that are classed as “royal game” in game law parlance,
and each one when aroused is sufficiently diverting to dispel
any lassitude produced by the climate. It is wakeful
sport—hunting these four kinds of game—and in my experience
elephant hunting is the “most wakefullest” of them all.

Being Killed by an Elephant Is a Very Mussy
Death

In my several months of African hunting I had four different
encounters with elephants. The first two were on Mount Kenia
and the last two were on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, near where it
merges into the lower slopes of Mount Elgon. The first and the
fourth experiences were terrifying ones, never to be forgotten.
An Englishman, if he were to describe them, would say “they
were rather nasty, you know,” which indicates how really
serious they were. The second and the third experiences were
interesting, but not particularly dangerous.

Mount Kenia is a great motherly mountain that spreads over
an immense area and raises its snow-capped peaks over eighteen
thousand feet above the equator. The lower slopes are as
beautiful as a park and are covered with the fields and the
herds of the prosperous Kikuyus and other tribes. Scores of
native villages of varying sizes are picturesquely planted
among the banana groves and wooded valleys on this lower slope,
each with its local chief, or sultan, and each tribe with its
head sultan.

In a day’s “trek” one meets many sultans with their more or
less naked retinues, and every one of them spits on his hand,
presses it to his forehead, and shakes hands with you. It is
the form of greeting among the Kikuyus, and, in my opinion,
might be improved. These people lead a happy pastoral life amid
surroundings of exceptional beauty. Above the cultivated
shambas, or fields of sweet potatoes and tobacco and
sugar and groves of bananas, comes a strip of low bush country.
It is a mile or two wide, scarcely ten feet high, and so dense
that nothing but an elephant could force its way through the
walls of vegetation. Most of the bushes are blackberry and are
thorny.

Following the Trail

The elephants in their centuries of travel about the slopes
have made trails through this dense bush, and it is only by
following these trails that one can reach the upper heights of
the mountain. Above the bush belt comes the great forest belt,
sublimely grand in its hugeness and beauty, and above this belt
comes the encircling band of bamboo forest that reaches up to
the timber line. There are probably five hundred thousand acres
of forest country in which the Kenia elephant may live and
wander and bring up his children. He has made trails that weave
and wind through the twilight shades of the forest, and the
only ways in which a man may penetrate to his haunts are by
these ancient trails. Mount Kenia, as seen from afar, looks
soft and green and easy to stroll up, but no man unguided could
ever find his way out if once lost in the labyrinth of trails
that criss-cross in the forest.

For many years the elephants of Kenia have been practically
secure from the white hunter with his high-powered rifles.
Warfare between the native tribes on the slopes has been so
constant that it was not until three or four years ago that it
was considered reasonably safe for the government to allow
hunting parties to invade the south side of the mountain. Prior
to that time the elephant’s most formidable enemies were the
native hunter, who fought with poisoned spears and built deep
pits in the trails, pits cleverly concealed with thin strips of
bamboo and dried leaves, and the ivory hunting poachers. In
1906 the government granted permission to Mr. Akeley to enter
this hitherto closed district to secure specimens for the Field
Museum, and even then there was only a narrow strip that was
free from tribal warfare. It was at that time that his party
secured seven splendid tuskers, one of which, a
one-hundred-fifteen-pound tusker shot by Mrs. Akeley, was the
largest ever killed on Mount Kenia. And it was to this district
that Mr. Akeley led our safari late in October to try
again for elephants on the old familiar stamping ground. We
pitched our camp in a lovely spot where one of his camps had
stood three years before, just at the edge of the thick bush
and on the upper edge of the shambas. News travels
quickly in this country, and in a short time many of his old
Kikuyu friends were at our camping place. One or two of the old
guides were on hand to lead the way into elephant haunts and
the natives near our camp reported that the elephants had been
coming down into their fields during the last few days. Some
had been heard only the day before. So the prospects looked
most promising, and we started on a little hunt the first
afternoon after arriving in camp.

The Old Wanderobo Guide

We took one tent and about twenty porters, for when one
starts on an elephant trail there is no telling how long he
will be gone or where he may be led. We expected that we would
have to climb up through the strip of underbrush, and perhaps
even as far up as the bamboos, in which event we might be gone
two or three days. In addition to the porters we had our
gunbearers and a couple of native guides. One of these was an
old Wanderobo, or man of the forest, who had spent his life in
the solitudes of the mountain and was probably more familiar
with the trails than any other man. He wore a single piece of
skin thrown over his shoulders and carried a big poisoned
elephant spear with a barb of iron that remains in the elephant
when driven in by the weight of the heavy wooden shaft. The
barb was now covered with a protective binding of leaves. He
led the way, silent and mild-eyed and very naked, and the
curious little skin-tight cap that he wore made him look like
an old woman. As we proceeded, other natives attached
themselves to us as guides, so that by the time we were out
half an hour there were four or five savages in the van.

He Was a Very Important Sultan

Saying Good-bye to Colonel Roosevelt

A Visiting Delegation of Kikuyus

No words can convey to the imagination the density of that
first strip of bush. It was like walking between solid walls of
vegetation, matted and tangled and bright with half-ripened
blackberries. The walls were too high to see over except as
occasionally we could catch glimpses of tree-tops somewhere
ahead. We wound in and out along the tortuous path, and it was
also torture-ous, for the thorn bushes scratched our hands and
faces and even sent their stickers through the cloth into our
knees. The effect on the barelegged porters was doubtless much
worse.

After a couple of hours of marching in those cañons
of vegetation we entered the lower edge of the forest and left
the underbrush behind. We soon struck a fairly fresh elephant
trail and for an hour wound in and out among the trees,
stumbling over “monkey ropes” and gingerly avoiding old
elephant pits. There were dozens of these, and if it had not
been for the fact that our old guide carefully piloted us past
them I’m certain more than one of us would have plunged down on
to the sharpened stakes at the bottom. Some of the traps were
so cleverly concealed that only a Wanderobo could detect them.
In places the forest was like the stately aisles of a great
shadowy cathedral, with giant cedars and camphor-wood trees
rising in towering columns high above where the graceful
festoons of liana and moss imparted an imposing scene of
vastness and tropical beauty. In such places the ground was
clean and springy to the footfall and the impression of a
splendid solitude was such as one feels in a great deserted
cathedral. At times we crossed matted and snaky-looking little
streams that trickled through the decaying vegetation, where
the feet of countless elephants had worn deep holes far down in
the mud. Then, after long and circuitous marching, we would
find ourselves traversing spots where we had been an hour
before.

Elephant Pits

The elephant apparently moves about without much definition
of purpose, at least when he is idling away his time, and the
trail we were following led in all directions like a mystic
maze. At this time I was hopelessly lost, and if left alone
could probably never have found my way out again. So we
quickened our steps lest the guides should get too far ahead of
us. In those cool depths of the forest, into which only
occasional shafts of sunlight filtered, the air was cold and
damp, so much so that even the old Wanderobo got cold. It made
me cold to look at his thin, old bare legs, but then I suppose
his legs were as much accustomed to exposure as my hands were,
and it’s all a matter of getting used to it.

Our porters, especially those that were most heavily loaded,
were falling behind and there was grave danger of losing them.
In fact, a little later we did lose them. The trail became
fresher and, to my dismay, led downward again and into that
hopeless mass of underbrush which at this point extended some
distance into the lower levels of the forest. We could not see
in any direction more than twenty-five feet—except above. If
our lives had depended on it we could not have penetrated the
dense matted barriers of vegetation on each side of the narrow
trail. The bare thought of meeting an elephant in such a place
sent a cold chill down the back. If he happened to be coming
toward us our only hope was in killing him before he could
charge twenty-five feet, and, if we did kill him, to avoid
being crushed by his body as it plunged forward. Without
question it was the worst place in the world to encounter an
elephant. And I prayed that we might get into more open forest
before we came up with the ones we were trailing. You can’t
imagine how earnestly we all joined in that prayer.

It was at this unpropitious moment that we
heard—startlingly near—the sharp crash of a tusk against a
tree somewhere just ahead. It was a most unwelcome sound. There
was no way of determining where the elephant was, for we were
hemmed in by solid walls of bush and could not have seen an
elephant ten feet on either side of the narrow trail. We also
didn’t know whether he was coming or going or whether he was on
our trail or some other one of the maze of trails.

We quickly prepared for the worst. With our three heavy guns
we crouched in the trail, waiting for the huge bulk of an
elephant to loom up before us. Then came another thunderous
crash to our right—and it seemed scarcely fifty yards away.
Then a shrill squeal of a startled elephant off to our left and
still another to the rear. Some elephants had evidently just
caught our scent, and if the rest of the elephants became
alarmed and started a stampede through the bush the situation
would become extremely irksome for a man of quiet-loving
tendencies. The thought of elephants charging down those narrow
trails, perhaps from two directions at once, was one that
started a copious flow of cold perspiration. We waited for
several years of intense apprehension. There was absolute
silence. The elephants also were evidently awaiting further
developments.

A Clearing in the Forest

A Kikuyu “Cotillion”

Kikuyu Women Flailing Grain

Then we edged slowly onward along the trail, approaching
each turning with extreme caution and then edging on to the
next. Somewhere ahead and on two sides of us there were real,
live, wild elephants that probably were not in a mood to
welcome visitors from Chicago. How near they were we didn’t
know—except that the sounds had come from very near, certainly
not more than a hundred yards—and we hoped that we might go
safely forward to where the bush would be thin enough to allow
us to see our surroundings. But there was no clearing. Several
times a crash of underbrush either ahead or to one side brought
us to anxious attention with fingers at the trigger guards. At
last, after what seemed to be hours of nervous tension, we came
to a crossing of trails, down which we could see in four
directions thirty or forty feet. A large tree grew near the
intersection of the trails, and here we waited within reach of
its friendly protection. It was much more reassuring than to
stand poised in a narrow trail with no possibility of
sidestepping a charge. We waited at the crossing for further
sounds of the elephants—waited for some time with rifles ready
and then gradually relaxed our taut nerves. A line of porters
with their burdens were huddled in one of the trails awaiting
developments. I took a picture of the situation and had stood
my rifle against the tree, and sat down to whisper the
situation over. All immediate danger seemed to have passed. It
seemed to, but it hadn’t.

The Porters Came Down the Trail

Like a sudden unexpected explosion of a thirteen-inch gun
there was a thundering crash in the bushes behind the porters,
then a perfect avalanche of terrified porters, a dropping of
bundles, a wild dash for the protection of the tree, and a
bunch of the most startled white men ever seen on Mount Kenia.
I reached the tree in two jumps, and three would have been a
good record. The crashing of bushes and small trees at our
elbows marked the course of a frenzied or frightened elephant,
and to our intense relief the sounds diminished as the animal
receded. I don’t think I was ever so frightened in my life. But
I had company. I didn’t monopolize all the fright that was used
in those few seconds of terror.

We then decided that there was no sane excuse for hunting
elephants under such conditions. We at least demanded that we
ought to see what we were hunting rather than blindly stumble
through dense bush with elephants all around us. So we beat a
masterly retreat, not without two more serious threats from the
hidden elephants. A boy was sent up a tree to try to locate the
elephants, but even up there it was impossible to distinguish
anything in the mass of vegetation around. We fired guns to
frighten away the animals, but at each report there was only a
restless rustle in the brush that said that they were still
there and waiting, perhaps as badly scared as we were.

My second elephant experience came the next day.

We started forth again, with a single tent, our guides and
gunbearers, a cook and a couple of tent boys and twenty
porters. This time we politely ignored all elephant trails in
the dense bush and pushed on through the forest. Here it was
infinitely better, for one could see some distance in all
directions. We climbed steadily for a couple of thousand feet,
always in forest so wild and grand and beautiful as to exceed
all dreams of what an African forest could be. It more than
fulfilled the preconceptions of a tropical forest such as you
see described in stories of the Congo and the Amazon.

The air was cold in the shadows, but pleasant in the little
open glades that occasionally spread out before us. Once or
twice in the heart of that overwhelming forest we found little
circular clearings so devoid of trees as to seem like
artificial clearings. Once we found the skull of an elephant
and scores of times we narrowly escaped the deep elephant traps
that lay in our paths. Many times we saw evidences of the giant
forest pig that lives on Mount Kenia and has only once or twice
been killed by a white man. Sometimes we came to deep ravines
with sides that led for a hundred feet almost perpendicularly
through tangles of creepers and bogs of rotted vegetation.

We dragged ourselves up by clinging to vines and monkey
ropes. On all sides was a solitude so vast as almost to
overpower the senses. The sounds of bird life seemed only to
intensify the effect of solitude. Once in a while we came upon
evidences of human habitation, little huts of twigs and leaves,
where the Wanderobo, or man of the forest, lived and hunted. Up
in some of the trees were thin cylindrical wooden honey pots,
some of them ages old and some comparatively new. And in the
lower levels of the forest we saw where the Kikuyu women had
come up for firewood. For some strange reason the elephants are
not afraid of the native women and will not be disturbed by the
sight of one of them. After seeing the women I am not surprised
that they feel that way about it, but I don’t see how they can
tell the women from the men. Possibly because they know that
only the women do such manual labor as to carry wood.

In the afternoon we reached the bamboos which lie above the
forest belt. Here the ground is clean and heavily carpeted with
dry bamboo leaves. The bamboos grow close together, all
seemingly of the same size, and are pervaded with a cool,
greenish shadow that is almost sunny in comparison with the
deep, solemn shades of the great forest.

Then we struck a trail. The old Wanderobo guide said it was
only an hour or so old and that we should soon overtake the
elephant. It was evidently only one elephant and not a large
one. It is fascinating to watch an experienced elephant hunter
and to see how eloquent the trail is to him. A broken twig
means something, the blades of grass turned a certain way will
distinguish the fresh trail from the old one, the footprints in
the soft earth, the droppings—all tell a definite story to
him, and he knows when he is drawing down upon his quarry. As
we proceeded his movements became slower and more cautious, and
the plodding drudgery of following an elephant trail gave way
to suppressed excitement.

It Looked Like the Rear Elevation of a Barn

Slower and slower he went, and finally he indicated that
only the gunbearers and ourselves should continue. The porters
were left behind, and in single file we moved on tiptoe along
the trail. Then he stopped and by his attitude said that the
quest was ended. The elephant was there. One by one we edged
forward, and there, thirty yards away, partly hidden by slender
bamboos, stood a motionless elephant. He seemed to be the
biggest one I had ever seen. He was quartering, head away from
us, and we could not see his tusks. If they were big, we were
to shoot; if not, we were to let him alone. As we watched and
waited for his head to turn we noticed that his ears began to
wave slowly back and forth, like the gills of a fish as it
breathes. The head slowly and almost imperceptibly turned, and
Akeley signaled me to shoot. From where I stood I could not see
the tusks at first, but as his head turned more I saw the great
white shafts of ivory. The visible ivory was evidently about
four feet long, and indicated that he carried forty or fifty
pounds of ivory. Then, quicker than a wink, the great dark mass
was galvanized into motion. He darted forward, crashing through
the bamboo as though it had been a bed of reeds, and in five
seconds had disappeared. For some moments we heard his great
form crashing away, farther and farther, until it finally died
out in the distance.

It was the first wild elephant I had ever seen, and it is
photographed on my memory so vividly as never to be forgotten.
I was more than half glad that I had not shot and that he had
got away unharmed.

That night we camped in a little circular clearing which the
Akeleys called “Tembo Circus,” for it was near this same
clearing that one of their large elephants had been killed
three years before, and in the clearing the skin had been
prepared for preservation. All about us stretched the vast
forest, full of strange night sounds and spectral in the
darkness. In the morning we awoke in a dense cloud and did not
break camp until afternoon. Our Kikuyu and Wanderobo guides
were sent out with promises of liberal backsheesh to find fresh
trails, but they returned with unfavorable reports, so we
marched back to the main camp again.

Thus ended our Kenia elephant experience, for a letter from
Colonel Roosevelt, asking Mr. Akeley if he could come to
Nairobi for a conference on their elephant group, led to our
departure from the Mount Kenia country.

The other two elephant experiences were much more
spectacular and perhaps are worthy of a separate story.

CHAPTER XI

NINE DAYS WITHOUT SEEING AN ELEPHANT. THE ROOSEVELT PARTY
DEPARTS AND WE MARCH FOR THE MOUNTAINS ON OUR BIG ELEPHANT
HUNT. THE POLICEMAN OF THE PLAINS

The Mount Elgon elephants have a
very bad reputation. The district is remote from government
protection and for years the herds have been the prey of
Swahili and Arab ivory hunters, as well as poachers of all
sorts who have come over the Uganda border or down from the
savage Turkana and Suk countries on the north. As a natural
consequence of this unrestricted poaching the herds have been
hunted and harassed so much that most of the large bull
elephants with big ivory have been killed, leaving for the
greater part big herds of cows and young elephants made savage
and vicious by their persecution. Elephant hunters who have
conscientiously hunted the district bring in reports of having
seen herds of several hundred elephants, most of which were
cows and calves, and of having seen no bulls of large size.

The government game license permits the holder to kill two
elephants, the ivory of each to be at least sixty pounds. This
means a fairly large elephant and may be either a bull or a
cow. The cow ivory, however, rarely reaches that weight and
consequently the bulls are the ones the hunters are after and
the ones that have gradually been so greatly reduced in
numbers. The elephants of this district roam the slopes of the
mountains and often make long swinging trips out in the broad
stretches of the Guas Ngishu Plateau to the eastward, in all a
district probably fifty miles wide by sixty or seventy miles
long.

The hunters who invade this section usually march north from
the railroad at a point near Victoria Nyanza, turn westward at
a little settlement called Sergoi, and continue in that
direction until they reach the Nzoia River. Naturally, these
names will mean nothing to one not familiar with the country,
but perhaps by saying that the trip means at least ten days of
steady marching in a remote and unsettled country, far from
sources of supplies, I will be able to convey a faint idea of
how hard it is to reach the elephant country.

Our purpose in making this long trip of ten weeks or more
was to try for black-maned lion on the high plateau and to
collect elephants for the group that Mr. Akeley is preparing
for the American Museum of Natural History. The government gave
him a special permit to collect such elephants as he would
require, two cows, a calf, a young bull, and, if possible, two
large bulls. One or more of these were to be killed by Colonel
Roosevelt and one by myself. It seemed promising that the cows,
calf, and young bull could be got on Mount Elgon, but the
likelihood of getting the big bulls was far from encouraging.
Lieutenant-Governor Jackson thought we might be successful if
we directed our efforts to the southeastern slopes of the
mountain and avoided the northeastern slopes along the River
Turkwel, which had been hunted a good deal by sportsmen and
poachers. If we were unable to get the big bulls on Elgon it
might be necessary to make a special trip into Uganda for them.
However, we determined to try, and try we did, through eight
weeks of hard work and wonderful experiences in that remote
district.

A Kikuyu Spearman

The Porters Like Elephant Meat

My Masai Sais and Gunbearers

At Sergoi, the very outpost of crude civilization, we were
warned not to go up the southern side of the mountain on
account of the natives that live there. We were told that they
were inclined to be troublesome. We met Captain Ashton and
Captain Black coming out after six weeks on the northern
slopes. They reported seeing big herds, but mostly cows and
calves. At Sergoi we also received word from Colonel Roosevelt
and at once marched to the Nzoia River, where we met him.

During our march we saw no elephants, but as we neared the
river there were fresh signs of elephant along the trail. It is
strikingly indicative of the “Roosevelt luck” that he saw, on
the morning we met him, the only elephants that he had seen in
the district, and that within twenty-four hours from that time
he had killed three elephants and Kermit one. Of this number
two cows killed by Colonel Roosevelt were satisfactory for the
group, and also the calf killed by his son, Kermit. This left
one young bull and two large bulls still to be secured, and to
that end we addressed our efforts during the succeeding
weeks.

For nine days we hunted the Nzoia River region, but without
seeing an elephant. There were kongoni, zebra, topi, waterbuck,
wart-hogs, reedbuck, oribi, eland, and Uganda cob, but scour
the country as we would, we saw no sign of elephant except the
broad trails in the grass and the countless evidences that they
had been in the region some time before. The country was
beautiful and wholesome. There was lots of game for our table,
from the most delicious grouse to the oribi, whose meat is the
tenderest I have ever eaten. There were ducks and geese and
Kavirondo crane; and sometimes eland, as fine in flavor as that
of the prize steer of the fat-stock show. Then there were
reedbuck and cob, both of which are very good to eat. So our
tins of camp pie and kippered herring and ox tongue remained
unopened and we lived as we never had before.

When the day’s hunt was over the sun in a splendid effort
painted such sublime sunsets above Mount Elgon as I had never
dreamed of. And the music of hundreds of African birds along
the river’s edge greeted us with the cool, delightful dawn.
Purely from an æsthetic standpoint, our days on the Nzoia
were ones never to be forgotten, while from the standpoint of
the man who loves to see wild game and doesn’t care much about
killing it, the bright, clear days on the Nzoia were memorable
ones. The Roosevelt party went its way back to civilization;
the Spaniards, De la Huerta and the Duke of Peñaranda,
came and made a flying trip up the mountain for elephant, then
returned and went their way. The young Baron Rothschild came on
to the plateau for a couple of weeks and then disappeared. And
still we lingered on, happy, healthy, generally hungry, and
intoxicated with the languorous murmur of Africa.

With Sharp Stakes in Them

Then we marched for the mountain on our big elephant hunt.
The details of those twelve days of adventuring in districts,
some of which were probably never traversed before by white
men, our experiences with the natives, our climb up the side of
the mountain and our camp in the crater; our icy mornings, our
ascent of the highest peak, and our explorations of the ancient
homes of the cave-dwellers—all are part of a remarkable series
of events that have nothing to do with an elephant story. In
the forests we saw numberless old elephant pits, and on the
grassy slopes there were mazes of elephants’ trails, some so
big that hundreds of elephants must have moved along them. But
we saw no elephants. We scanned the hills for miles and tramped
for days in ideal elephant country, but our quest was all in
vain. Then our food supplies ran low, our last bullock was
killed, and we hurried back to the base camp on the river, a
hungry, tired band of a hundred and twenty men.

The matter of provisioning a large number of porters far
from the railroad is a serious one. In addition to carrying the
safari outfit, the porters must carry their
posho, or cornmeal ration, and it is impossible for
them to carry more than a limited number of days’ rations. So
the farther one gets from the base of supplies the more
difficult it is to move, and a relay system must be employed.
Porters must be sent back for food, often six or eight days; or
else a bullock wagon must be used for that purpose. In our
safari we used two wagons, drawn by thirty oxen, to
supplement the porters in keeping up food supplies, and even by
so doing there were times when rations ran low. In such times
we would shoot game for them, either kongoni or zebra, both of
which are considered great delicacies by the black man.

However, this is not telling about my memorable elephant
experiences in the Guas Ngishu Plateau.

We got back to the Nzoia River on December third. On the
fifteenth, after many more unsuccessful attempts to get in
touch with a herd, Mr. Akeley and I resolved to try the
mountain again. We thought that perhaps the elephants might
have moved northward along the eastern slope, and so we thought
we’d push clear up to the Turkwel River and find out beyond
question. We outfitted for an eight days’ march, carried only
one tent and a small number of good porters. Only the absolute
necessaries were taken, for we expected to move fast and hard.
The first day we marched eight hours, crossed the Nzoia River,
and by a curious chance at once struck a fresh trail which was
diagnosed as being only a few hours old. The bark torn from
trees was fresh and still moist; the leaves of the branches
that had been broken off as the elephants fed along the way
were still unwithered, and the flowers that had been crushed
down by the great feet of the herd had lost little of their
freshness and fragrance.

The trail led us first in one direction, then in another;
sometimes it was a big trail that plowed through the long grass
like a river, with little tributaries branching in and out
where the individual members of the herd had swerved out of the
main channel to feed by the way. And sometimes when all the
herd were feeding, the main trail disappeared, to be replaced
by a maze of lesser trails leading in all directions. But by
the skilful tracking of our gunbearers the main trail would be
found again some distance onward. We followed the trail for
hours, and then, night coming on, we went into camp near a
small stream, choked with luxuriant vegetation. Akeley thought
he heard a faint squeal of an elephant far off, and while the
porters made camp we went on for a mile or so to investigate.
But no further sounds indicated the proximity of the herd.

Early the next morning we took up the trail again, and in
less than an hour my Masai sais pointed off to a distant slope
a couple of miles away, where a black line appeared. It looked
like an outcropping of rock. Akeley looked at it and exclaimed,
“By George, I believe he’s got them!” and a moment later, after
he had directed his glasses on the distant spot, he said
briskly, “That’s right, they’re over there.” And so, for the
first time, after having scanned suspicious-looking spots in
the landscape for weeks and always with disappointment, I saw a
herd of real live elephants. To the naked eye they looked more
like little shifting black beetles than anything else, but in
the glasses they were plainly revealed with swaying bodies and
flapping ears and swinging trunks.

In elephant hunting the first important thing to consider is
the wind, for the elephant is very keen-scented and is quick to
detect a breath of danger in the breeze. Fortunately we had
seen them in time. If we had gone ahead a few hundred yards
they would have got our wind and gone away in alarm, but this
had not occurred. We could see that they were feeding quietly
and without the slightest evidence of uneasiness.

Some Kikuyu Belles

Wanderobo Guides

We left our horses and the porters under a big tree and told
the latter to come on if they heard any firing; otherwise, they
were to await our return. Then, with only our gunbearers and a
man carrying Akeley’s large camera, we circled in a wide detour
until we were safely behind the elephants. The wind continued
favorable, and we cautiously approached the brow of a hill near
where we had last seen them. They had disappeared, but their
trail was as easy to follow as an open road. Before reaching
the brow of the next hill one of the gunbearers was sent up a
tree to reconnoiter the country beyond.

“Hapa,” he whispered, as he carefully climbed down
and indicated with his hand that they were near. Again we swung
in a wide circle and came over the brow of the next hill.
There, four or five hundred yards away, was the herd of
elephants, standing idly under the low trees that studded the
opposite slope. There were between forty and fifty of them, and
from the number of totos, or calves, we assumed that
many of the big ones were cows. We studied the herd for some
minutes, estimating the ivory and trying in vain to pick out
the bulls. There is very little difference between the
appearance of a cow and a bull elephant when the latter has
only moderate-sized tusks. Usually the tusks of the male are
heavier and thicker, but except for this distinction there is
very little noticeable difference between the two. Of course,
an elephant with gigantic tusks is at once known to be a bull,
but if he has small tusks it is a matter of considerable
guesswork.

Two Kongoni on Guard

We could not tell which ones of this herd were bulls, but
assumed that there must surely be several small-sized or young
bulls among them. We decided to go nearer, knowing that the
elephant’s eyesight is very poor, and with such a favoring wind
his sense of smell was useless. It seemed amazing that they did
not see us as we walked up the slope toward them. When a couple
of hundred yards away we climbed a tree to study them some
more. They were in three separate groups, each of which was
clustered sleepy and motionless under the trees. They had
ceased feeding and had evidently laid up for their midday rest,
although the hour was hardly ten in the morning.

From our “observation tower” in the tree we studied the
three groups as well as we could. So far as we could judge
there were at least three bulls of medium size, but as we
looked those three lazily moved off toward the group on the
extreme left. At that time we were within about a hundred yards
of the nearest group with the wind still favorable, and except
for one thing we might easily have crept up through the grass
to within thirty or forty yards. Directly between us and the
elephants were two kongoni, one lying down and the other alert
and erect.

The Policemen of the Plains

The kongoni is the policeman of the plains. He is the
self-appointed guardian of all the other animals, and for some
strange, unselfish reason, he always does sentinel duty for the
others. His eyes are so keen that he sees your hat when you
appear over the horizon two miles away, and from that moment he
never loses sight of you. If you approach too near he whistles
shrilly, and every other animal within several hundred yards is
on the alert and apprehensive. The kongoni often risks his own
life to warn other herds of animals of the approach of danger,
and if I were going to write an animal story I’d use the
kongoni as my hero. The hunters hate him for the trouble he
gives them, but a fair-minded man can not help but recognize
the heroic, self-sacrificing qualities of the big, awkward,
vigilant antelope. Why these two sentinels had not seen us is
still and always will be a mystery, but it is certain that they
had not.

At the same time we knew that any attempt to approach nearer
would alarm them and they in turn would sound the shrill tocsin
of warning to the unsuspecting elephant herd, in which event we
might have to track the elephants for miles until they settled
down again. So we cautiously climbed down, retreated below the
edge of the hill, and worked our way up in the lee of the group
farthest to our left in the expectation of finding the three
bulls. From tree to tree, and in the protection of large
ant-hills, we moved forward until we were less than fifty yards
from the elephants. Then we studied them again, but could not
locate the bulls.

Probably at this time something may have occurred to make
the elephants nervous. Perhaps the warning cry of a bird or the
suspicious rustling of our footsteps in the tall grass, but at
any rate the herd began to move slowly away. Two of the larger
groups marched solemnly down the slope away from us and the
other disappeared among the low scrub trees to our right. We
followed the two larger groups and soon were again within a few
yards of them. An ant-hill four or five feet high gave us some
protection, and over the top of this we watched the enormous
animals as they stood under the trees ahead of us. While
watching these two large groups we forgot about the one that
had disappeared to the right.

Suddenly one of the gunbearers whispered a warning and we
turned to see this group only a few yards from us and bearing
directly down toward the ant-hill where we crouched in the
grass. They had not yet seen us, but it seemed a miracle that
they did not. If one of us had moved in the slightest degree
they would have charged into us with irresistible force. We
held our guns and our breath while these big animals, by a most
fortunate chance, passed by us to the windward of the ant-hill,
not more than thirty feet away. If they had passed to the
leeward side they would have got our wind and trouble would
have been unavoidable. I took a surreptitious snap-shot of them
after they had passed by, and for the first time in some
minutes took a long breath.

Then we circled the herd again and came up to them. They
were now thoroughly uneasy. They knew that some invisible
hostile influence was abroad in the land, but they could not
locate in which direction it lay. We saw the sensitive trunks
feeling for the scent and saw the big ears moving uneasily back
and forth. One large cow with a broken tusk was facing us,
vaguely conscious that danger lay in that direction. And then,
by some code of signals known only to the elephant world, the
greater number of elephants moved off down the slope and up the
opposite slope. Only the big, aggressive cow and four or five
smaller animals remained behind as a rear-guard. She stood as
she had stood for some moments, gazing directly at us and
nervously waving her ears and trunk.

The Rear-guard

Akeley climbed to the top of an ant-hill and made some
photographs showing the big cow and her companions in the
foreground, while off on the neighboring hillside three
distinct groups of elephants were in view. The latter were
thoroughly alarmed and moved away very swiftly for some
distance and then came to a pause. The big cow and her
attendants then moved off, feeling that the retreat had been
successfully effected. Once more we followed them and came up
to them, and then once more we were flanked by a number of
elephants that had previously disappeared over the hill. They
had swung around and were returning directly toward where we
stood, unsuspecting.

We barely had time to fall back to some small bushes, where
we waited while the flanking party approached. They came almost
toward us, and when only about fifty feet away I ventured a
photograph, feeling that, if successful, it would be the
closest picture ever made of a herd of wild elephants. I used a
Verascope, a small stereoscopic French machine whose “click” is
almost noiseless. The elephants advanced and we huddled
together with rifles ready in the patch of bushes. It seemed a
certainty that they would charge, and that if our bullets could
not turn them we would be completely annihilated. But as yet
there was no sign that they saw us, or, if they did, they could
not distinguish our motionless forms from the foliage of the
scrub.

At last, the foremost elephant, barely thirty feet from us,
came to the trail in the grass by which we had retreated when
we first saw them. The trunk, sweeping ahead of it as if
feeling for the scent of danger, paused an instant as it
reached the trail and then the animal drew back sharply as
though stung. Then it whirled about and the herd went crashing
away through the sparse undergrowth. It was a time of the
utmost nervous tension, and I don’t believe the human system
could undergo a prolonged strain of that severity.

It Started Back as Though Stung

During all this time we had not succeeded in positively
locating a bull elephant. Of all the forty-four elephants that
were visible at any one time, there was not one that we could
feel safe in identifying as the elephant needed for the group.
Three more times we stalked the herd to very close range, but
they were now so restless that nothing could be ascertained. So
finally we decided to get ahead of them and watch them as they
passed us, but just as we had reached a point where they were
approaching, the two kongoni gave a shrill alarm and the entire
herd made off in tremendous haste. Later, on our way back to
camp, we came up with one group of six or seven, but they
seemed too angry and aggressive to take needless chances with,
so we watched them a while and then left them behind.

During all that day we were with the herd nearly five hours,
five hours of intense nervous strain, during which time there
was never a moment when we were not in some danger of
discovery. But in spite of the aggressive bearing of some of
them at one time or another, I had the feeling that the
elephants would run away from us the instant they definitely
determined where we were. And it was while laboring under this
impression that I met my second Mount Elgon herd of elephants
and learned by bitter experience that the impression was wholly
false. But that is still another story, the story of being
charged five times in one day by angry elephants, and how I
killed a bull elephant for the Akeley group.

CHAPTER XII

“‘TWAS THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS.” PHOTOGRAPHING A CHARGING
ELEPHANT. CORNERING A WOUNDED ELEPHANT IN A RIVER JUNGLE
GROWTH. A THRILLING CHARGE. HASSAN’S COURAGE.

On the night of December the
twenty-third I sat out in a boma watching for lions. None came
and at the first crack of dawn my two gunbearers and I crawled
out of the tangled mass of thorn branches, and prepared to
return to camp two miles away. We were expecting my sais to
arrive with my horse soon after daybreak, and while waiting for
him to come, and for my gunbearers to get the blankets tied up,
I went across to a neighboring swamp in the hope of getting a
bushbuck. I was about three hundred yards from the boma when my
attention was drawn to a movement in the trees about a quarter
of a mile away. I looked and saw what I first thought was a
herd of zebras coming toward me. They looked dark against the
faint light of early dawn and seemed surprisingly big. Then I
realized! They were elephants! I had only my little gun and my
big double-barreled cordite was at the boma, three hundred
yards away. Breathlessly I ran for it, fearing that the
elephants might cut me off before I could reach it. There
seemed to be from seven to ten of them, but they soon
disappeared in the trees, going at a fast swinging walk.
Hassan, my first gunbearer, stopped to slip a couple of solid
shells in the gun while I ran to the top of a hill in the hope
of catching sight of the herd. But they had disappeared
entirely. We soon found the trail strongly marked in the
dew-covered grass. My sais then appeared with my horse. He had
seen two elephants and they had taken alarm at his scent and
were rapidly fleeing. So I galloped back to camp to tell the
rest of the party and to prepare for a systematic pursuit.

After breakfast, with Akeley, Stephenson, Clark and our
gunbearers, the trail was again picked up where I had left it.
It was then a little past nine and the elephants had two hours’
start of us. Their trail indicated that they were moving fast
and so we prepared for a long chase. For nearly two hours we
followed, Akeley tracking with remarkable precision. Sometimes
the trail was faint and merged with older trails, but by
looking carefully the fresh trail was kept. Soon we began to
see newly broken branches from the trees which indicated that
the elephants were getting quieted down and were beginning to
feed. It must have been about eleven o’clock when Stephenson
saw the herd far across on another slope. There were two of the
animals distinctly visible and another partly visible. They
were resting under some of the many acacia trees that dappled
the slope of the hill. We stopped to examine them with our
glasses. One seemed to have no tusks, but we finally saw that
it had very small ones. The other and larger one had one good
tusk and one that was broken off. After about twenty minutes we
left our horses and with only our gunbearers moved across
toward them, thinking that there must be others that we had not
yet seen. The wind was bad, sometimes sweeping up in our
direction through the depression between the two slopes and a
moment later coming from another direction. At one time the
wind blew from us directly toward the elephants and we expected
to see them take alarm and run away. But they did not. We
circled around and approached them from a better direction and
advanced to within a couple of hundred yards without being
detected. We then stopped for a conference. If there was a
young bull I was to kill it for the Akeley group; if there was
a large bull Stephenson was to kill it for himself; if there
were only cows we were not to shoot unless absolutely
necessary. In this event, Akeley was to take his camera, and
with “Fred,” “Jimmy” Clark, and I as escorts with our
double-barreled cordite rifles, was to advance until he could
get a photograph that would show an elephant the full size of
the plate. If the elephants charged we were to yell and try to
turn them without shooting; if they came on we were to shoot to
hurt, but not to kill.

Fred was on one side of “Ake,” Jimmy on another, and I on
Fred’s left. Thus we slowly moved toward the elephants. A
reedbuck was startled out of the grass and noisily ran away,
giving the alarm. The elephants began feeling in the air with
their trunks and their ears began to wave uneasily. Finally
they turned and seemed about to go away. Then Fred saw, a short
distance to the right, some more elephants that had previously
been hidden by the trees. We both whispered to Ake to stop, but
he either did not hear us on account of his heavy sun hat or
else was too intent upon the elephants in front to heed.

A Nandi Spearman

In the Deep Jungle Growth

As the Elephant Fell

“Ake,” whispered Fred, “there’s a good bull over there with
good tusks. Wait a minute.” But Ake, camera in position,
continued to advance and so we followed. The elephants, a big
cow and a half-grown one, were now facing us with ears wide
spread. They looked very nasty. I thought they would turn and
run away and was not uneasy about the outcome. But to my great
surprise they started toward us, first slowly and then at a
rapid trot, steadily gaining in swiftness. It was a real charge
and we yelled to scare them off. The big cow was in the lead
and she had not the slightest intention of being scared. Her
one idea was to annihilate us. We raised our rifles and
continued to yell, but on she rushed. She was only thirty yards
away when Jimmy fired, Fred fired, and then I. The huge animal
sank on her four knees and the half-grown one turned off and
stopped, confused and angry. Akeley had got a splendid
photograph of the charging cow and now he took one of the
smaller beast before we approached the cow. Upon our advance
the smaller one ran away but the big cow never moved again. She
was stone dead. The three bullets had struck her, Jimmy’s high
as she was head on, Fred’s between the eye and ear as she
swung, and mine just behind the orifice of the ear as the head
was still further swung by the shock of Fred’s bullet. The
elephant rested on her four knees in an upright position, quite
lifelike in appearance. The small elephant ran off toward those
that we had seen on our right. I suggested that we immediately
follow the herd in the hope that a young bull might be found
among them. So off we went and in a few moments we saw them to
our right, apparently returning to where the cow had been
killed. It is entirely likely that the big broken-tusked cow
was going back to make trouble for us. Colonel Roosevelt had a
similar experience with a bull elephant that returned and
charged the hunters as they were standing about one that they
had just killed.

They Whirled Around

As the elephants moved along slowly we paralleled them and
studied them as well as we could. One was the big cow with the
one broken and one good tusk. She was leading the group, and
was doubtless a vicious animal. She was an enormous beast,
probably over eleven feet in height. Another was the half-grown
elephant, then a smaller one, and lastly a good-sized elephant
with two fairly good tusks. We tried to determine the sex of
this last one, I hoping that it was a bull, but fearing
otherwise. Ake thought it was a cow with tusks about twelve or
fourteen inches long, but the fact that its breasts showed no
signs of milk fullness led me to hope that it was a young bull,
and I determined to act on that supposition. I at once advanced
with my big gun in readiness. The two largest elephants at the
same moment whirled around and started swiftly toward us. I
rested my gun against the side of a small tree and after their
onward rush had brought them within fifty yards I fired as Ake
suggested, “just between the eye and ear.” The animal swerved
but did not fall. Akeley and Stephenson fired at the big cow
and under the shock of their heavy shells she dropped to her
knees, then sprang up and came on again. Once more they shot
and she again went down on her knees, but got up, shaking her
head and turned a little to one side. Stephenson started to
shoot her again, but Ake shouted, “Don’t shoot her again. She’s
got enough.” Mr. Stephenson followed her for some distance and
decided that she was going to recover, and so came back. In the
meantime my elephant, with the two smaller ones, was moving off
to the left, and with my small rifle I fired at its backbone,
the only vulnerable spot visible. A spurt of dust rose, but the
elephant did not stop. So, accompanied by Hassan and Sulimani,
my two gunbearers, I started after the wounded elephant and the
two younger ones. The big one was moving slowly, as though
badly wounded. The wind was bad, so we circled around to head
them off and in doing so completely lost them. Presently we
struck their trail and followed them by the blood-stains on the
grass.

After some minutes we saw them moving along in the tall
grass near the Nzoia River. Again we swiftly circled to head
them off before they could cross the river, but when we reached
a point where they had last been seen they had disappeared in
the dense tangle of trees and high reeds that grew at the
river’s edge. We thought they would cross the river, so we
rushed after them. Suddenly Hassan yelled “Here they come!”
and, ahead of us, came the large elephant, its head rising from
above the sea of grass like the bow of a battleship bearing
rapidly down upon us. The two smaller ones were almost
invisible, only the back of one appearing above the reeds. We
were out in the open and the situation looked decidedly
dangerous. I hastily drew a bead on the big one’s forehead,
fired, but it didn’t stop. There was barely time for us to get
out of the way. I ran sideways toward a little mound that
furnished some protection, while Hassan, with a coolness and
courage that I both admired and envied, stood still until the
big elephant was within ten feet of him and then leaped to one
side as the three beasts swept by him, carried onward by the
impetus of their mad rush. As the big one passed it made a
vicious swing at him with its trunk.

Bow On

The Bull Elephant

Cooking Elephant Meat

Fortunately the elephants continued in their course and we
followed them with my big rifle again reloaded and ready. Once
more they turned in toward the river and were completely
swallowed up in the tall reeds. We again waded in after them
and had gone only a few yards when we once more saw the angry
head of the big one looming up as it came toward us. I fired
point-blank at the base of the trunk and the beast stopped
suddenly. Then it slowly turned and as it was about to
disappear in the tall elephant grass again I fired at its
backbone. The huge bulk collapsed and disappeared, buried in
the reeds. Hassan yelled that it was dead, but we couldn’t see
for the grass. The situation now was perilous in the extreme.
The river made a sharp bend at this point like an incomplete
letter O, with a narrow neck of land through which the
elephants had passed when I had shot. At the narrow neck it was
about a hundred feet across while the depth of the “O” was
about three hundred feet and the width about two hundred and
fifty feet. This small peninsula was matted with a jungle
growth of high grass and reeds six or eight feet tall, while
the edges of the river were thickly wooded with small trees
tangled together and interlacing their branches over the narrow
but deep waters of the Nzoia.

Awaiting the Charge

Down in the jungle depths of this peninsula there was a
violent commotion among the low branches of these trees, an
indication that the animal was not dead, but was thrashing
madly about as if desperately wounded. Hassan said it was the
young elephant and that the older one was dead, but this could
not be determined without pushing on through the reeds until we
would be almost upon them. This course seemed too dangerous to
try.

The river at this point was absolutely impassable for
animals. The banks were ten feet high and perpendicular. The
water was perhaps five or six feet deep and the width of the
swift stream not over twenty or thirty feet. The trees had
interlaced their roots and branches across the river and in the
water. No animal, not a tree climber, could possibly cross the
stream on account of the straight up and down banks.

So after a time we crept along through the grass at the edge
of the stream until we reached a point probably forty yards
from where the elephants doubtless were, although quite hidden
from our view. There was still a tremendous threshing in the
low branches of the trees and in order to see the animals we
had to creep cautiously across the peninsula to a point about
half-way, where a large, rotten, dead tree stood. This gave us
cover and from its screen we could see the three elephants,
only fifteen yards away. The head of the big one was still up
and it was turned directly at us. It was so close and so big
that the effect was terrifying.

“Mkubwa,” whispered Sulimani, and that means “big.”
So the big elephant, instead of being dead, was still alive,
with an impassable river at its feet on one side, a dense
tangle of trees on two other sides, and with a narrow open
aisle between it and ourselves. The two smaller elephants were
at its side. To see to fire I had to step out from the tree and
expose myself, and as I stepped out the wounded beast saw me
and reared its head as if to make a final rush. I fired
point-blank; it swung around and a second shot sent it down.
Hassan grabbed my arm and told me to hurry back before the two
smaller elephants charged. If they did so it might be necessary
to shoot them, which we didn’t want to do. So we ran swiftly
back to the edge of the river and waited. But all was quiet,
and after a time we climbed across the river on the interlacing
branches, circled around to where the elephants were visible
just across the stream and scared the two smaller ones away.
Once more we swung across from branch to branch over the swift
waters of the river and reached the other bank where lay the
mountainous bulk of the dead elephant. It was a young bull
about eight feet high and with two well-shaped tusks twenty-two
inches long in the open, or approximately thirty-eight inches
in all.

Sulimani was sent to notify Mr. Akeley and Mr. Clark, and
after a long search found them, and together they arrived a
couple of hours later, followed by gunbearers and saises. Mr.
Stephenson had gone back to camp to see that salt and supplies,
with one tent, were sent out.

Then began the work of measuring the elephant, a work that
must be done most thoroughly when the trophy is to be mounted
entire. There were dozens of measurements of every part of the
body, enough to make a dress for a woman, and then came the
skinning, a prodigious task that took all of the late afternoon
and evening. We investigated the position of an elephant’s
heart which Kermit Roosevelt had said was up in the upper third
or at the top of the second third of the body, a spot which
must be reached by a shot directed through the point of the ear
as it lay back. As a matter of fact, an elephant’s heart lies
against the brisket, about ten or eleven inches from the bottom
of the breast. A broadside shot through the front leg at the
elbow would penetrate the heart.

At nine o’clock, Christmas Eve, the tent arrived and was
soon put up in the jungle of high grass at the middle of the
little peninsula. A more African scene can not be imagined. The
porter’s fires, over each of which sticks spitted with elephant
meat en brochette were cooking, imparted a weird look
to the river jungle grass and spectral trees.

At ten o’clock we had our dinner and at eleven we put on our
pajamas and with the camp-fire burning before the tent and the
armed askaris pacing back and forth, gave ourselves up to lazy
talk, then meditation and then sound sleep.

It was a wonderful day—one always to be remembered.

The next day, Christmas, came without the usual customs of
Christmas morn. In the forenoon we stuck with the bull
elephant, getting its skin and bones ready for transportation
back to camp; and in the afternoon came the work of saving the
skull and part of the skin of the cow elephant. The porters
must have thought the day a wonderful one, for they ate and
gorged on elephant meat until they could hardly move.

CHAPTER XIII

IN THE SWAMPS ON THE GUAS NGISHU. BEATING FOR LIONS WE CAME
UPON A STRANGE AND FASCINATING WILD BEAST, WHICH BECAME
ATTACHED TO OUR PARTY. THE LITTLE WANDEROBO DOG

One of the most exciting phases of
African hunting is the beating of swamps for lion. A long
skirmish line of native porters is sent in at one end of the
swamp and, like a gigantic comb, sweeps every live thing ahead
of it as it advances through the reeds. All kinds of swamp life
are stirred into action, and a fairly large swamp will yield
forth the contents of a pretty respectable menagerie. Sometimes
a hyena or two will be flushed and once in a while a lion will
be driven out.

It is the constant expectation of the last-named animal that
gives such keen and long sustained interest to the work of
beating a swamp. One never knows what to expect. A suspicious
stir in the reeds may mean a lion or only a hyena; an enormous
crashing may sound like a herd of elephants, but finally
resolve itself into a badly frightened reedbuck. Most of the
time you expect reedbuck, but all the time you have to be ready
for lion. As a general thing a lion will slink along in the
reeds ahead of the beaters and not reveal himself until he is
driven to the end of the cover. Then he will grunt warningly or
show an ear or a lashing tail above the reeds, and instantly
every one is in a state of intense expectancy. What the next
move will be no one knows, but it is more than likely to be
something of a supremely dramatic sort.

One day we were beating swamps on the Guas Ngishu Plateau.
Lions seemed to be numerous in that district. Two days before I
had killed two lions near by, and during the morning Stephenson
and I had each killed a lioness in the same line of marshy reed
beds. We now intended advancing to the next large swamp of the
chain and see whether a large, black-maned lion might not be
routed out.

Conditions seemed propitious, for in this selfsame swamp
Colonel Roosevelt had seen the best lion of his trip some weeks
before. Perhaps the lion might still be there.

The campaign was planned with great thoroughness. Forty or
fifty porters were formed into the customary skirmish line and
on each side we paralleled the beaters with our rifles. At the
word of command the column began to advance and the interest
reached a fever heat. The swamp was five or six hundred yards
long, and for the first three hundred yards nothing of a
thrilling sort occurred. The shouts of the beaters blended into
a rhythmic, melodious chant and the swish of their sticks as
they thrashed the reeds was enough to make even the king of
beasts apprehensive.

Abdi, the Somali Head-man

Along the Nzoia River

Beating a Swamp for Lions

Over on my side of the swamp there was a wide extension of
dry reeds and bushes through which I was obliged to go in order
to keep in touch with the skirmish line of porters. We had got
three-quarters the full length of the swamp and any moment
might reasonably expect to hear from a lion if there was one
ahead of us. Every rifle was at readiness and the porters were
advancing less impetuously. In fact, they were pretending to go
forward without doing so.

Suddenly a wild shout from a porter near by, then a hurried
retreat of other porters, and then a cautious advance gave sign
that something desperate was about to happen. We caught a
glimpse of reeds moving about and then saw something crouched
in the grass beneath. Two ears were finally distinguished among
the tangle of rushes, and there was no further doubt about it.
It was not a lion. It wasn’t even a hyena.

It was a little dog. His presence in the middle of that
swamp was about as logical as if he had been a musk-ox or a
walrus. However, there he was, gazing up at us from the
bulrushes, with mild, friendly eyes and a little tail that was
poised for wagging at the slightest provocation. He was
instantly christened “Moses” for obvious reasons. Later the
name was changed to Mosina, also for obvious reasons.

After the line of porters had regained their composure the
lion beat continued, but no lion appeared. The sum total of the
wild beasts yielded by that promising swamp was one (1) little
black and tan dog with white feet.

It Was Not a Lion

Some of our genealogical experts addressed themselves to the
task of figuring out the why and wherefore of little Mosina and
what in the world she was doing out in a lion and leopard
infested place. Leopards in particular are fond of dogs, not
the way you and I are fond of them, but in quite a different
way. A leopard, so it is said, prefers a dog to any other food
and will take daring chances in an effort to secure one for
breakfast, dinner, or supper. Therefore, how little Mosina
escaped so long is a mystery yet unsolved.

The experts decided after a thorough consideration of the
case, viewing it from all possible angles, that the little dog
was a Wanderobo dog. The Wanderobo are natives who live solely
by hunting and generally have the most primitive sort of a
grass hut at the edge of a swamp or deep in the solitudes of
the forest. They put rude honey boxes up in the trees to serve
as beehives, and it is from this honey and from the game that
they kill with their bows and arrows and traps and spears that
they manage to eke out a meager living.

Like all true hunters, they keep dogs, and it is more than
likely that little Mosina was the ex-property of some
wild-eyed, naked Wanderobo who lived in the swamp. When our
great crowd of noisy beaters appeared at the other end of the
swamp the Wanderobo had doubtless crawled out of his hole and
made off for the nearest tall grass. In going he had left
behind Mosina as a rear-guard to cover his retreat or to stay
the invaders’ advance until he could reach the nearest spot
available to a hasty man.

So we adopted this theory as to why Mosina was in the
bulrushes, and in honor of her Wanderobo associations we again
changed her name to “Little Wanderobo Dog.” So far as I know,
she is the only dog in history who has had three separate and
distinct names within two hours. Of course, there are people
who have called dogs more than three different names in much
less time, but they were not Christian names. One of the
bachelor members of the committee, who is known to be a
woman-hater, conferred the honorary title of the pronoun “he”
on Little Wanderobo Dog, and she has been “he” ever since. But
not without a bitter fight by those of the committee who think
the pronoun “she” is infinitely more to be admired.

Little Wanderobo Dog did not wait to be adopted. He adopted
us, but not ostentatiously at first—just a friendly wag here
and there to show that he had at last found what he was looking
for. By degrees he became more friendly and genial, so that at
the end of an hour he was thoroughly one of us.

I have never seen a milder-eyed dog than Little Wanderobo.
Innocence and guilelessness struggled for supremacy, with
“confidence in strangers” a close third. You couldn’t help
liking him, for with those meek and gentle eyes, together with
manners above reproach, he simply walked into your heart and
made himself at home.

I think that we were a good deal of a surprise to him. In
all his short young life he had probably never known anything
but kicks and cuffs. When he met a stranger he naturally
expected to have something thrown at him, or to have a stubby
toe or hard sandal projected into his side. Imagine his
wonderment to find people who actually petted him and played
with him. At first he didn’t know how to play, but it was
amazing to see how fast he learned. He was ready to play with
any and all comers at any and all times. You could arouse him
from a deep slumber and he would be ready to engage in any form
of gaiety at a second’s notice.

They talk about “charm.” Some people have it to a wonderful
degree. You like them the minute you meet them, and often don’t
really know why. Perhaps because you simply can’t help it.
Well, that was the chief characteristic of Little Wanderobo
Dog. He had more charm than anything I’ve ever met, and so it
is only natural that he should have walked into our affections
in the most natural, unaffected sort of way.

I don’t know what he thought of us, but I really believe
that he thought he had gone to Heaven. We fed him and played
with him, and finally he gained a little assurance, and
actually barked. He barked at one of our roosters, and then we
knew that he considered himself past the probation stage. He
had confidence enough to assert himself in a series of lusty
barks without fearing a hostile boot or an angry shout. The
first time he barked we all rushed out of our tents in wonder
and admiration. It was the most important event of the day, and
it caused a great deal of talk of a friendly nature.

There was one umbrageous cloud on Little Wanderobo Dog’s
horizon, however—a cloud that he soon learned to evade. The
Mohammedans didn’t like him. It is a part of their creed to
hate dogs almost as much as pork, and to be touched by a dog
means many prayers to Allah to wipe away the stain of contact.
But Little Wanderobo Dog was not conversant with the Mohammedan
creed at first, and in his gladness and joy of life he embraced
everybody in the waves of affection and friendliness that
radiated from him like a golden aura.

The Somali gunbearers were disciples of Allah, and they
began to kick at him before he was within eight feet of them.
Two of the tent boys were also Mohammedans, but they had to be
more circumspect in their hostility. Whenever Little Wanderobo
Dog came around they would edge away, which gave the former a
certain sense of importance because it was flattering to have a
number of grown-up men fear him so much. Then there were a
number of the porters who were Mohammedans of a sort, but these
were wont to say, “O, what is a creed among friends?”

It was quite cold up on the plateau at night. Sometimes the
wind swept down from the distant fringe of mountains and shook
the tents until the tent pegs jumped out of the ground. The
night guard would pile more wood on the big central camp-fire
near our tents and the porters, in their eighteen or twenty
little tents, would huddle closer together for warmth. They
were nights for at least three blankets, and even four were not
too many.

Consequently Little Wanderobo Dog was confronted by the
necessity of adopting a place to sleep where he would be safe
from those sharp arrows of the north wind that swept across the
high stretches of the plateau. So he ingratiated himself into
my tent with many friendly wags of his tail and a countenance
of such benign faith in human nature that he was allowed to
remain. At many times in the night I was awakened and I knew
that Little Wanderobo Dog was dreaming about some wicked swamp
ogre that was trying to kick him.

At first he was not a silent sleeper, but later on these
awful nightmares came with less frequency and I presume his
dreams took on a more beatific character. As a watch-dog I
don’t believe he had great value, because of his readiness to
make friends with anything and anybody. If a leopard had come
into the tent he would have said, “Excuse me, but I think you
are in the wrong place,” but he would never have barked or
conducted himself in an ungentlemanly way.

One could never tell what was likely to come into one’s tent
at night, even with armed askaris patrolling the camp all night
long. One cold night, before Little Wanderobo Dog had come to
live with us, I was awakened by a curious rustle of the tent
flaps. I listened and then watched the tent flap for some
moments, thinking that the wind might have been responsible.
But there was no wind and it seemed beyond doubt that some
animal had entered.

For a long time I listened, but could hear nothing; and yet
at the same time I had a positive conviction that I was not
alone in the tent. I wondered if it could be a leopard, or some
small member of the cat tribe. I knew that it wasn’t a dog, for
there were no dogs anywhere in the vicinity of the camp. As the
minutes went by without any hostile move from the darkness, I
decided to let whatever it was stay until it got ready to
depart. So I went to sleep.

Once more in the night I was awakened by a noise in the tent
and as nearly as I could diagnose the situation, the noise came
from under my cot. But, I reasoned, if the animal is there,
it’s behaving itself and if it were on mischief bent it would
have transacted its business long before. So I went to sleep
again.

Just at dawn the clarion crow of a rooster came from under
my bed. It was one of the roosters the cook had bought from a
Boer settler and had come in to escape the coldness of the
night air without. It was a most agreeable surprise, for there
was a homelike sound in the crow of the rooster that was
pleasantly reminiscent of the banks of the Wabash far away.

After Little Wanderobo Dog became “acclimated” to the warm
and friendly atmosphere of hospitality of the camp, he began to
show evidences of tact and diplomacy. He bestowed his
attentions, with unerring impartiality to all of us. In the
evening, and frequently during the day, he would pay ceremonial
visits to each of the four tents of the msungu, as the
white people are called. First he would approach the threshold
of one tent, cock an inquiring ear at the occupant, and upon
receiving the customary sign of welcome would wag himself in
and pay his respects. After a short call he would wag his way
out and call at the next tent, where the same performance was
repeated.

A Ceremonial Call

He never burst into a place like a cyclone of happiness, but
rather, he sort of oozed in and oozed out, his mild brown eyes
brimming with gentleness and his tail, that eloquent insignia
of canine gladness, wigwagging messages of good cheer.

In one of the tents of the msungu there was a pet
monkey. It had been captured down on the Tana River months
before and at first was wild and vicious. As time went by it
lost much of its wildness and to those it liked was
affectionate and friendly. To all others it presented variable
moods, sometimes friendly and sometimes unexpectedly and
unreasonably hostile. We feared that Little Wanderobo Dog would
have some bad moments with the little Tana River monkey, and
their first meeting was awaited with keen interest. We thought
the monkey would scratch all the gentleness out of the Little
Wanderobo Dog’s eyes and that the two animals would become
bitter enemies.

But nothing of the sort happened. Little Wanderobo Dog
managed the matter with rare tact. He succeeded in slowly
overcoming the monkey’s prejudices, then in inspiring
confidence, and finally in establishing play relations. It was
worth a good deal to see the dog and monkey playing together,
the latter scampering down from his tent-pole aery, leaping on
the dog, and scampering hurriedly over the latter, with a quick
retreat to the invulnerable heights of the tent-pole. Little
Wanderobo Dog would allow the monkey to roam at will over his
features and anatomy, thereby showing tolerance which I thought
impossible for any animal to show. After Little Wanderobo Dog
had paid his devoirs to his host, which he did each day with
great punctiliousness, he would then retire to some sunny spot
and enjoy his siesta. He was great on siestas and usually had
several each day.

The Entente Cordiale

In time he learned to distinguish between Mohammedans and
other dark-complexioned people and held himself aloof from the
former, thereby escaping any humiliating races with the heavy
boots of the gunbearers and other followers of Allah. He made
friends with little Ali, the monkey’s valet, a small Swahili
boy who looked like a chocolate drop in color, and like a
tooth-powder ad in disposition. It was Ali’s duty to carry the
monkey on our marches.

The little gray monkey, with its venerable looking black
face fringed with a sunburst of white hair, would be tied to an
old umbrella of the Sairey Gamp pattern, and would sit upon it
as the small boy carried it along the trails on his shoulder,
like a musket. Sometimes when the sun was strong the umbrella
would be raised to shield the monkey’s eyes, which could not
stand the fierce glare incident to a long march upon sun-baked
trails. At such times the monkey, who rejoiced in the brief
name of J.T. Jr.—the same being emblazoned on the little
silver collar around its neck—at such times the monkey would
scamper from shoulder to shoulder of the small boy, with
occasional excursions up in the woolly kinks of the heights
above. It was a funny picture and one that never failed to
amuse those who watched it.

Well, Little Wanderobo Dog, by some prescient instinct
hardly to be expected in one brought up in a swamp, decided
that little Ali and the monkey were to be his “companions of
the march.” So, when the tents were struck and Abdi, the
head-man, shouted “Funga nizigo yaka!” and the tented
city of yesterday became a scattered heap of sixty-pound
porters’ loads, Little Wanderobo would seek out Ali and prepare
to bear him company during the long stretches of the march. And
then when the long line of horsemen, native soldiers, porters,
tent boys, gunbearers, ox gharries, and all began to wind their
sinuous way over veldt or through forest, there was none in the
line more picturesque than Ali and J.T. Jr. surrounded by the
affable Little Wanderobo Dog.

Being Posed for a Post Mortem Picture

The Triumvirate

The Three Comrades

It is little wonder that friendship soon ripened into love,
and that we all became speedily and irrevocably attached to the
little swamp angel. His presence in any gathering was like a
benediction of good cheer, and when his tail was in full swing
he looked like a golden jubilee. As I say, it was no wonder we
liked him, and I think I may also say, without flattering
ourselves, that the sentiment was reciprocated. I don’t believe
the joy he showed at all times could have been assumed. It must
have been pure joy, without alloy.

His table manners were above reproach. He would, never grab
or show unseemly greed. He awaited our pleasure and each bone
or chop that fell his way was received with every token of mute
but eloquent gratitude. You were constantly made to feel that
he loved you for yourself and not for what he hoped you would
give him. If I were to be wrecked on a desert island, I believe
there is hardly more than one person that I’d prefer to have as
my sole companion than Little Wanderobo Dog.

Perhaps a few words about the architecture of the little dog
might not come amiss. He was built somewhat on the lines of the
German renaissance, being low and rakish like a dachshund, but
with just a little more freeboard than the dachshund. His legs
were straight instead of bowed, as are those of his
distinguished German cousin. His ears were hardly as pendulous,
being rather more trenchant than pendulous, and therefore more
mobile in action. His tail was facile and retroussé,
with a lateral swing of about a foot and an indicated speed of
seventeen hundred to the minute. When you add to these many
charms, those mild eyes, surcharged with love light, and a bark
as sweet as the bark of the frangipanni tree and as cheerful as
the song of the meadow-lark, you may realize some of the
estimable qualities that distinguished Little Wanderobo
Dog.

For some weeks he stayed with us, Tray-like in his
faithfulness, and always in the vanguard when danger threatened
the rear. One day our caravan passed through a group of
migrating Wanderobos. There were a dozen or so of men, all
armed with spears and bows and arrows; also fifteen or twenty
women, thirty or forty totos, and about a score of
dogs.

Here was the test. Would Little Wanderobo Dog, reclaimed
from the swamp, harken to the call of the blood and join the
band of his own kind? If he did, we could only bow our heads in
grief and submission, for after all were not we only foster
friends and not blood relations? But Little Wanderobo Dog never
wavered in his allegiance to us. He had planted his lance by
our colors and with these he would stick till death.

He passed those other Wanderobo dogs as if they were
creatures from another world. If he felt tempted to join his
fellow dogs, there was no indication of it, and at night when
we reached our camp we found our faithful follower at his
accustomed post, stanch, firm and true to his colors, which
were black and tan.

But alas, there comes a time when the best of friends must
part. And the dark day came when I saw Little Wanderobo Dog for
the last time. It was at Escarpment. Our long months of hunting
were over. Our horses and porters and all our equipment were on
the train bound for Nairobi, where we were to settle our
affairs and leave Africa and its happy hunting ground. Little
Wanderobo Dog had been let out of his first-class compartment
in the train and was running up and down the platform,
wigwagging messages of gladness with his tail and sniffing
friends and strangers with dog-like curiosity. Some friends of
ours were at the train to say howdy-do and to shake our hands,
and with these the little dog was soon on friendly terms.

When the train whistle blew and the bell was rung and some
more whistles blew and more bells were rung, Little Wanderobo
Dog was taken back into his car. The last good-bys were said
and we were off for Nairobi. Suddenly there was a startled cry,
a whisk of a tail, and the dog was gone—out of the car window.
He lit on his nose, but as far back as we could see he sat in
the middle of the next track and gazed at the receding train.
Two days later Mrs. Tarlton came down from Escarpment and said
that she had rescued the dog and that he was installed in the
hospitable home of Mrs. Hampson, where he would remain until he
rejoined those members of our party who were to remain in
Africa some months longer. It is likely that Little Wanderobo
Dog may be taken on a great elephant hunt in Uganda and, who
knows, some time he may visit America. I hope so, for I’d like
to give him a dinner.

Our Last View

CHAPTER XIV

WHO’S WHO IN JUNGLELAND. THE HARTEBEEST AND THE WILDEBEEST,
THE AMUSING GIRAFFE AND THE UBIQUITOUS ZEBRA, THE LOVELY
GAZELLE AND THE GENTLE IMPALLA

In the course of the average
shooting experience in British East Africa the sportsman is
likely to see between twenty and thirty different species of
animals. From the windows of the car as he journeys from
Mombasa to Nairobi, three hundred and twenty-seven miles, he
may definitely count upon seeing at least seven of these
species: Wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant’s gazelle, Thompson’s
gazelle, zebra, impalla, and giraffe, with the likelihood of
seeing in addition some wart-hogs and a distant rhinoceros, and
the remote possibility of seeing cheetah, lion, and hyena. Of
the bird varieties the traveler will be sure of seeing many
ostriches, some giant bustards, and perhaps a sedate
secretary-bird or two.

Hassan and a Hartebeest

The Author’s Home in Africa

Beautiful Upland Country

These animals are the common varieties, and after a short
time in the country the stranger learns to tell them apart. He
knows the zebra from his previous observation in circuses; he
also does not have to be told what the giraffe is, but the
other ones of the seven common varieties he must learn, for
most of them are utterly strange to an American eye.

Gazelle, with Wildebeest in Background

He soon learns to pick out the wildebeest, or gnu, by its
American buffalo appearance; he comes to know the little
Thompson’s gazelle by its big black stripe on its white sides
and by its frisky tail that is always flirting back and forth.
The Grant’s gazelle is a little harder to pick out at first,
and one is likely to get the Grant’s and Tommy’s confused. But
after a short time the difference is apparent, the Grant’s
being much larger in stature and has much larger horns and is
minus the Thompsonian perpetual motion tail. It certainly is a
stirring tail! The impalla is about the same size as the
Grant’s gazelle, but has horns of a lyrate shape.

The hartebeest is speedily identified, because he is unlike
any other antelope in appearance and exists in such large
numbers in nearly every part of East Africa. Indeed, if a
returned traveler were asked what animal is most typical of the
country he would at once name the hartebeest. He sees it so
much and so often that after a time it seems to be only a
necessary fixture in the landscape. A horizon without a few
hartebeests on it would seem to be lacking in completeness.

Furthermore, the stranger soon learns that the hartebeest is
commonly called by its native name, kongoni, and by the time
his shooting trip is over the sight of the ubiquitous kongoni
has become as much of his daily experience as the sight of his
tent or his breakfast table. To me the kongoni appealed most
strongly because of his droll appearance and because of a
many-sided character that stirs one’s imagination.

He is big and awkward in appearance and action; his face is
long and thin and always seems to wear a quizzical look of good
humor, as if he were amused at something. Others besides myself
have remarked upon this, so I am hoping that the kongoni wore
this amused look even at times when he was not looking at me.
His long, rakish horns are mounted on a pedicle that extends
above his head, thus accentuating the droll length of his
features. His withers are unusually high and add to the awkward
appearance of the animal. Standing, the kongoni is a picture of
alert, interested good humor; running, he is extremely funny,
as he bounces along on legs that seem to be stiffened so that
he appears to rise and fall in his stride like a huge rubber
ball. We made quite a study of the kongoni, for he is a most
interesting animal. He is unselfish and vigilant in protecting
the other creatures of the plain. His eyes are as keen as those
of a hawk, and when a herd is feeding there are always several
kongoni sentinels posted on ant-hills in such a strategic way
that not a thing moves anywhere on the plains that escapes
their attention. Oftentimes I have cautiously crept to the top
of a ridge to scan the plains, and there, a mile away, a
kongoni would be looking at me with great interest.

If you try to approach he will remain where he is until his
warning sneezes have alarmed all the other animals, and
finally, when all have fled, he goes gallumphing along in the
rear. He is the self-appointed protector of his fellow
creatures, the sentinel of the plains. I have seen him run back
into danger in order to alarm a herd of unsuspecting
zebras.

He leads the wildebeests to water and he lends his eyes to
the elephants as they feed. With nearly every herd of game, or
near by, will be found the faithful kongoni, always alert,
watchful, and vigilant, and it is nearly always his cry of
warning that sends the beasts of the plains flying from dangers
that they can not see.

The sportsman swears at the kongoni because it so often
alarms the quarry he is stalking. How very often it happens!
The hunter sees afar some trophy that he is eager to secure and
straightway begins a careful stalk of many hundred yards. At
last, after much patient work, he reaches a point where he
feels that he can chance a shot. He takes a careful sight and
at that moment a kongoni that has been silently watching him
from some place or other gives the alarm, and away goes the
trophy beyond reach of a bullet. And then how the hunter curses
at the kongoni, who has stopped some little distance away and
is regarding him with that quaint, lugubriously funny look. It
almost seems to be laughing at him.

One day I tried to shoot a topi. It was a broiling hot day
and the sun hung dead above and drove its burning javelins into
me as I crept along. For seven hundred yards, on hands and
knees, I slowly and painfully made my way. The grass wore
through the knees of my trousers and the sharp stubbles cut my
palms; once a snake darted out of a clump of grass just as my
hand was descending upon it, and lizards frequently shot away
within a yard of my nose. My neck was nearly broken from
looking forward while on my hands and knees, and it was nearly
an hour of creeping progress that I spent while stalking that
topi.

When I got within two hundred and fifty yards, and was just
ready to take a careful aim, with an ant-hill as a rest, a
kongoni somewhere gave the alarm, and away went the topi, safe
and sound but badly scared. The kongoni went a little way off
and then turned and grinned broadly. I was momentarily tempted
to shoot him, but on second thought I realized that he had
acted nobly from the animal point of view, so I forgave
him.

Outward Bound—Reading Your Thoughts—Concluding your
Intentions Are Hostile

The kongoni seems to be gifted with a clairvoyant instinct.
He knows when you don’t want to shoot him and when you do. If
you start out in the morning with no hostile intentions toward
him he will allow you to approach to within a short distance.
He will be alert and watchful, but he will show no anxiety. But
just suppose for an instant that you change your mind. Suppose
you say to yourself that the porters have had no meat for
several days and that it might be well to shoot a kongoni. The
latter knows what is passing in your mind long before you have
made a single movement to betray your intentions. He begins to
edge away, ready in an instant to go bounding rapidly beyond
rifle shot.

I’ve seen a herd of kongoni standing quite near, watching me
with curious interest, but without fear. Perhaps I was intent
upon something else and hardly noticed them. Suddenly a
villainous thought might enter my head, such as “That big
kongoni has enormous horns,” and instantly the herd would prick
up their ears, run a few steps, and then turn to verify their
suspicions. Then, if the villainous thought still lurked in my
brain, they would sneeze shrilly and go galloping away in the
distance. There is no way to explain this except to attribute
it to thought transference, and this in spite of the fact that
the kongoni doesn’t understand English.

The kongoni is found nearly every place in East Africa.
Along the railway between Makindu and Nairobi the species is
called Coke’s hartebeest. Farther up the railway the species is
Neumann’s hartebeest, while still beyond, on the Guas Ngishu
Plateau and the Mau escarpment, the species is called Jackson’s
hartebeest. In the main the three varieties are almost the
same; it is in the horns that the chief distinction lies, with
lesser differences in color and stature. The hunter has been
allowed to kill ten of each on his license, but under the new
game ordinance in force since December, 1909, only four
Jackson’s are allowed and twenty Coke’s instead of ten.

The Young Kongoni Is Very Funny

When we went across the Guas Ngishu Plateau in early
November we saw thousands of Jackson’s hartebeest, and never a
calf. When we came back in late December and early January we
saw hundreds and hundreds of calves, many of them less than a
day old. The stork must have been busy, for they all arrived at
once. These little calves come into the world fully equipped
for running, and almost immediately after birth go bounding
along after their mothers, so awkward and so funny that I’m not
surprised that their own mothers look perpetually amused.

The hartebeest, or kongoni, is hard to kill. The Dutch gave
him the name for that reason. It often seems as if bullets have
no effect on him. He will absorb lead without losing a trace of
his good-humored look, and after he has been shot several times
he will go bounding earnestly away, as if nothing was the
matter. If he succeeds in joining a herd there is little way of
distinguishing which one has been shot, unless he suddenly
exhibits signs or falls over. Otherwise he is quite likely to
gallop away, far beyond pursuit, and then slowly succumb to his
wounds.

Again I’ve seen them knocked over and lie as if dead, but
before one could approach they would be up and off as good as
ever. This is the great tragedy of the conscientious hunter’s
life—the escape of a wounded animal beyond pursuit—and the
thought of it is one that keeps him awake at night with a
remorseful heart and saddened thoughts. Whenever I shall think
of Africa in the future, I shall think of my old friend, the
kongoni, dotting the landscape and sticking his inquiring ears
over various spots on the horizon. In four and a half months I
think I must have seen at least a hundred thousand kongoni.

The giraffe is also a creature of most amusing actions. You
are pretty certain to see a bunch of them as you come up the
railway from the coast. They were the first wild animals I saw
in British East Africa—a group of four or five quietly feeding
within only a hundred yards of the thundering railway engine.
They were in the protected area, however, and seemed to know
that no harm would reach them there. Later on in the morning we
saw other herds, but invariably at long range, sometimes
teetering along the sky line or appearing and disappearing
behind the flat-topped umbrella acacias.

They Run Loosely but Earnestly

The giraffe is most laughable when in action. He first looks
at you, then curls his tail over his back, and then lopes off
with head and neck stuck out, and with body and legs slowly
folding and unfolding in a most ungainly stride. It is hard to
describe the gait of a giraffe to one who has never seen it,
but any one would at once know without being told that a
giraffe couldn’t help being funny when running.

As a general thing it is difficult to approach a giraffe.
With their keen eyes and great height they almost invariably
see you before you see them, and that will be at seven or eight
hundred yards’ distance. From the moment they see you they
never lose sight of you unless it is when they disappear behind
a hill a mile or two away.

When seen on the sky-line a herd of giraffe will suggest a
line of telegraph poles; when seen scattered along a hillside,
partly sheltered under the trees, they blend into the mottled
lights and shadows in such a way as to be almost invisible. I
have been within two hundred yards of a motionless giraffe and,
although looking directly at it, was not aware that it was a
giraffe until it moved. It might easily have been mistaken for
a bare fork of the tree, with the mottled shadows of the leaves
cast upon it.

Along the Tana River I saw several herds of giraffe, perhaps
fifty head in all, but it was on the great stretches of the
scrub country that slopes down from Mount Elgon that I saw the
great herds of them. One afternoon I saw twenty-nine together,
big black males, beautifully marked tawny females, and lots of
little ones that loomed up like lamp posts amidst a group of
telegraph poles. Within two hours I saw two other herds of
seven and nine each, and every day thereafter it was quite a
common thing to run across groups of these strange-looking
animals browsing among the trees.

One is not allowed to kill a giraffe except under a special
license, which costs one hundred and fifty rupees, or fifty
dollars. One of our party had a commission to secure a specimen
for a collector and had been unsuccessful in getting it. That
circumstance led to an amusing adventure that I had with a
giant giraffe. One day, with my gunbearers, I had ridden out
from camp in search of wild pigs. Ten minutes after leaving
camp I drew rein hastily, for off to my left and in front a
lone giraffe of great size and of splendid black color was
slowly careening along toward me. If he continued in his course
and did not see us he would pass within a hundred yards of me.
So I hastily but quietly dismounted to try for a photograph as
he passed.

A moment or two later he saw me for the first time and at
once swung into a funny trot. I took the picture, and then the
thought struck me, “Why not drive him into camp, where he could
be secured by the one having a special license?” I jumped on my
horse and galloped around him, but in a few moments struck a
ravine so rocky that I had to walk my horse through the worst
of it. By the time I had crossed the giraffe was some hundred
yards ahead. Still farther ahead the prairie was burning and
the long line of fire extended a mile or more across our
front.

I thought this fire would swing the giraffe off, and so it
became a race to reach the fire line first, in order to swing
him in the right direction. The ground was deep with prairie
grass, as dry as tinder, and scattered throughout were
innumerable holes in the ground made by the ant-bears and
wart-hogs. Any one of these holes was enough to throw a horse
head over heels if he went into it. I had no gun, having left
it with my gunbearer when I took the picture. So there was
nothing to hinder me as we swept across the great plain.

We passed the camp half a mile away at a furious pace, the
giraffe holding his own with the horse and keeping too far in
front to be turned. By degrees we approached the prairie fire
and the flames were leaping up three or four feet in a line
many hundred yards long. The giraffe hesitated and then
breasted the walls of fire; I didn’t know whether my horse
would take the salamander leap or not, and as we rushed down
toward it I half-expected that he would stop suddenly and send
me flying over his shoulders. But he never wavered. The
excitement of the chase was upon him and he took the leap like
an antelope. There was a moment of blinding smoke, a burning
blast of air, and then we were galloping madly on across the
blackened dust where the fire had already swept.

For two miles I galloped the giraffe, vainly endeavoring to
swing him around, but once a swamp retarded me and another time
a low hill shut the giraffe from view. When I passed the hill
he had disappeared and could not be found again. There was no
deep regret at having lost him, for I felt particularly
grateful to him for having given me the most exhilarating and
the most joyous ride I had in Africa.

The large male giraffes often appear solid black at a
distance, for the yellow bands separating the splotches of
black are so slender as to be invisible at even a short
distance. The females are much lighter and usually look like
the giraffes we see in the circuses at home.

Then there’s the ubiquitous zebra, almost as numerous as the
kongoni. You see vast herds of zebra at many places along the
railway, and thereafter, as you roam about the level spots of
East Africa, you are always running into herds of them. At
first, the sight of a herd of zebras is a surprise, for you
have been accustomed to seeing them in the small numbers found
in captivity. It is a source of passing wonder that these rare
animals should be roaming about the suburbs of towns in hundred
lots. You decide that it would be a shame to shoot a zebra and
determine not to join in this heartless slaughter.

Later on your sentiments will undergo a change. Everybody
will tell you that the zebra is a fearful pest and must be
exterminated if civilization and progress are to continue. The
zebra is absolutely useless and efforts to domesticate him have
been without good results. He tramps over the plains, breaks
down fences, tears up the cultivated fields, and really
fulfills no mission in life save that of supplying the lions
with food. As long as the zebras stay the lions will be there,
but the settlers say that the lions are even preferable to the
zebras.

Under the old game ordinance expiring December fifteenth,
1909, a sportsman was allowed two zebras under his license;
under the new one he is allowed twenty! That reveals the
attitude of East Africa toward the jaunty little striped
pony.

Zebra, Wildebeest and Gazelle (Wildebeest in
Middle)

In action the zebra is dependent upon his friend, the
kongoni. When the latter signals him to run, he trots off and
then turns to look. If the kongoni sends out a 4-11 alarm, the
zebra will hike off in a Shetland-pony-like gallop and run some
distance before stopping. They have no endurance and may be
easily rounded up with a horse.

On the Athi Plains may be found the bones of scores of
zebras, each spot marking where a lion has fed; and in the
barb-wire fences of the settlers other scores of withered hides
and whitened skulls mark where they have fallen before the grim
march of civilization.

With each sportsman granted an allowance of twenty zebras,
it may not be so long before the zebra will be forced to seek
the sanctuary of the game reserves, which, happily, are large
enough to insure his escape from extinction.

The zebra’s chief peculiarity, aside from his beautiful
markings, is a dog-like bark which is much more canine than
equine in its sound. The zebra’s chief charm is its colt, for
there is nothing alive that is prettier or more graceful than a
young zebra a few weeks old.

The only Grant’s gazelles that I saw were those along the
railway at Kapiti Plains and Athi Plains. This animal is
graceful and beautiful, with a splendid sweep of horns. With
them, and in much greater numbers, is the little “Tommy,” or
Thompson’s gazelle, a graceful, buoyant, happy, bounding little
antelope with an ever active tail flirting gaily in the
sunshine. The Tommy is small, about twice as big as a fox
terrier, and is of a fawn color. Along the lower parts of his
sides is a broad white belt, along the middle of which runs a
bold black stripe. The effect is strikingly handsome.

The impalla is much bigger than the Tommy, and he usually
travels in large herds of fifty or more. It is no uncommon
sight to see one buck with twenty or thirty females, and it is
probably due to the fact that hunters try to get the male
specimens as trophies that accounts for the vast preponderance
of females in the various antelope herds. The impalla is seen
along the railroad and in enormous numbers out along the Thika
Thika and Tana Rivers. There are also many up in the Rift
Valley and doubtless in other sections. From my own experience
and observation they were most abundant on the Tana River.

Impalla Buck and Lady Friends

The wildebeest, or gnu, is found on the Athi Plains and
northward along the Athi River and the Thika Thika. One need
never travel more than two hours’ drive or walk from Nairobi to
see wildebeest, but it’s a different thing to get them. You
would have to travel many hours, most likely, before you
succeeded in bringing down a wildebeest.

My first shot in Africa was at a wildebeest at three hundred
yards. The bullet struck, but so did the wildebeest. He struck
out for northern Africa, and when last seen was still headed
earnestly for the north pole. I am consoled in thinking that my
shot must have inflicted more surprise than injury and so I
hope he has now fully recovered, wilder and beastier than of
yore.

My last shot in Africa, the day before leaving for the
coast, was at a wildebeest an hour or so out of Nairobi. This
time I missed entirely and repeatedly and the wildebeest
remains unscathed to roam the broad plains of the Athi until
some better or luckier shot passes his way. If I have anything
on my conscience, it is certainly not the remorse of having
reduced the supply of wildebeests.

Wildebeest With the White Man Only Eight Miles
Away

In our last few days’ shooting out on the Athi Plains we saw
perhaps fifty or seventy-five of these great bison-like
animals. Their bodies and legs and tails are slender and
graceful, like those of a horse, but the heads are
heavy-featured, heavy-horned and heavy-bearded. They are wild
and when they see you a mile or so away will start and run for
the nearest vanishing point, usually arriving there long before
you do.

The foregoing seven species of animals are the ones most
commonly seen in East Africa. Perhaps something about some of
the less common ones will have some instructive value.

CHAPTER XV

SOME NATURAL HISTORY IN WHICH IT IS REVEALED THAT A
SING-SING WATERBUCK IS NOT A SINGING TOPI, AND THAT A TOPI IS
NOT A SPECIES OF HEAD-DRESS

While reading an account of the
trophies secured by Colonel Roosevelt on the Guas Ngishu
Plateau, I was mystified by seeing the name of an animal I had
never heard tell of—a singing topi. For a time I puzzled over
this strange creature and finally evolved a satisfactory
explanation of how the animal made its appearance in the
despatches. Briefly, “there haint no sich animal,” as the old
farmer said when he saw his first dromedary in a circus; it was
merely a mistake, due to the telegraphic abbreviations which
foreign correspondents employ to save cable tolls.

What the correspondent meant to say was that the colonel had
secured a sing-sing waterbuck and a topi. The word
“waterbuck” was omitted because he assumed that everybody at
home would know that a “sing-sing” was a species of waterbuck,
wherein he was mistaken, for comparatively few people in
America know what a sing-sing is, or, for that matter, what a
topi is, or what a Uganda cob is. When his despatch had been
transmitted through several operators on its way to the States
the word “sing-sing” became “singing” and was supposed to be an
adjective describing the topi. Hence the “singing topi.”

The American paragraphers also had fun with the word “topi,”
for they thought a topi was a sun hat much worn in the hot
countries. From this course of reasoning it was probably
assumed that Colonel Roosevelt had shot some kind of a singing
sun hat, which was certainly enough to cause comment.

There are two kinds of waterbuck that the East African
hunter will find in the course of his travels, the common
waterbuck which we saw in such numbers on the Tana River, and
the Defassa, or “sing-sing” waterbuck, which is found in the
higher altitudes up toward the Mau escarpment and Mount Elgon.
Both of these varieties of waterbuck are beautiful animals,
almost as large as a steer, and with great sweeping horns that
often exceed twenty-five inches in length. In some instances
the horns have been nearly three feet long, but the longest one
that our party secured was only twenty-nine inches in length.
As a trophy for a wall there are few heads in Africa more noble
than that of the waterbuck.

In all our wanderings, during which we saw at least two
thousand waterbuck, we found that the does outnumbered the
males by ten to one and that usually in a herd of twenty there
would be only one big male and one or two smaller ones. We also
never saw them in water, but usually not a great distance from
a marsh or stream. They were much shier than the hartebeest and
zebra, and upon seeing our approach would be the first to run
away. And by a curious chance the does seemed to know that it
was the buck only that was in danger. They would often turn to
watch us, while the buck himself would keep on running until he
had put many hundreds of yards between himself and the
threatened danger. Then, and then only, would he turn to watch,
and it usually required careful stalking to get within gunshot
of him again.

Waterbuck

The doe is not pretty, being thickly and clumsily built,
with a heavy, ungraceful neck, but the buck is like a painting
by Landseer, noble, graceful, and beautifully marked with white
and black on his dark gray coat.

We didn’t kill many waterbuck, because there is no excuse
for doing so except to secure the heads as trophies. The meat
is so coarse and tough that even the porters, who seldom draw
the line at eating anything their teeth can penetrate, do not
care for waterbuck meat except under the stress of great
hunger. They do like the skin, however, for it is of the
waterbuck skin that their best sandals are made. Consequently,
when a waterbuck is killed there is a fierce scramble among the
porters to secure portions of the hide for this purpose.

The male waterbucks are savage fighters among themselves,
and it was not uncommon to see big bulls with one horn gone or
with both horns badly broken or marred as a result of the
jealous struggle for dominance of a herd of does.

The topi is something like the hartebeest, but much more
beautiful and much more rare. It is over four feet high, with
skin of a dark reddish brown, with a silklike bluish gray
gloss. On the shoulders and thighs are bluish black patches and
the forehead and nose are blackish brown. The under parts are
bright cinnamon. We ran across this beautiful antelope only on
the Guas Ngishu Plateau, although it is found in one or two
other districts in East Africa. In all our weeks of rambling on
the high plains near Mount Elgon I think I saw several hundred
head of topi, always shy and quick to take alarm.

A Uganda Cob

The Lordly Eland

The meat is the most delicious of any of the large
antelopes, and the skin, when properly cared for, is as soft as
kid and as brilliant as watered silk. The head is a fine trophy
on account of its rich coloring rather than because of its
horns, which are not particularly graceful in curve or
proportion, but which are wonderfully ridged.

Topi

I am sure that if I were a beautiful topi with a skin like
watered silk I should be deeply humiliated to be mistaken for a
singing sun hat.

The topi’s nearest relations are the sasseby, the tiang, and
the korrigum. And now you know all about the topi. The game
ordinance allows the sportsman to kill two topi, and the holder
of a license will work hard to get his two, for they are
splendid trophies.

The duiker is another little antelope that one meets
frequently in the grassy places of East Africa. It is small,
with dark complexion, and goes through the high grass in a way
that strongly suggests the diving of a porpoise at sea. In
fact, it gets its Dutch name for that reason, duiker
bok, meaning “diving buck” in Dutch. There are a dozen or
more different species of duikers, and they may be found
scattered all over South and East Africa. They are difficult to
shoot, for their diving habits make them a fleeting target;
also their size, about twenty or thirty pounds in weight, makes
them a small target.

Quite often the little duiker will hide in the grass until
you have almost stepped on him, and then, if he considers
discovery inevitable, he will spring away with his little
huddled-up back rising and disappearing over the grass exactly
as the porpoise does in the water. One day while we were
beating some tall grass for lions, one of the porters stepped
on a duiker, and its sharp horns, twisting suddenly, cut him on
the ankle. The horns of the bucks are short and straight, from
four to six inches long, but most often about four and a half
inches.

It would take an expert mathematician to keep track of all
the different kinds of duikers, for there’s the crowned duiker,
the yellow-backed duiker, the red duiker, Jentink’s duiker,
Abbott’s duiker, the Ituri red duiker, the black-faced duiker,
Alexander’s duiker, the Ruddy duiker, Weyn’s duiker, Johnston’s
duiker, Isaac’s duiker, Harvey’s duiker, Roberts’ duiker,
Leopold’s duiker, the white-bellied duiker, the bay duiker, the
chestnut duiker, the white-lipped duiker, Ogilby’s duiker,
Brooke’s duiker, Peter’s duiker, the red-flanked duiker, the
banded duiker, Walker’s duiker, the white-faced duiker, the
black duiker, Maxwell’s duiker, the black-rumped duiker, the
Uganda duiker, the blue duiker, the Nyasa duiker, Heck’s
duiker, the Urori duiker, Erwin’s duiker, and I suppose a lot
more that the naturalists have not had time to catalogue.

Like a Popular Cemetery

One would assume that with all these duikers there would
hardly be room left in Africa for any other animals. But there
is. For instance, there’s the oribi and the dik-dik, to say
nothing of the steinbuck and the klipspringer. The last named
is a rock-jumping antelope, the others little grass antelopes,
and all of them are as pretty and cute as animals can be. They
are all small, the dik-dik being scarcely larger than a rabbit,
and they are divided into as many subspecies as the duiker. A
list of the different kinds of oribi would take up several
lines of valuable space without conveying any illuminating
intelligence to the lay mind.

We found thousands of oribi on the Guas Ngishu Plateau. You
couldn’t go half a mile in any direction without stirring up
large family parties of them, and a landscape looked lonely
unless one could see a few oribi bounding over the ant-hills or
rising and falling as they leaped through the grass. When we
first went into the plateau the grass was long and the oribi
were for the most part fleeting streaks of yellow over the tops
of it, but later when we came out the grass had been burned and
the young, tender grass had spread a green carpet over the
plains. Then the oribi were visible everywhere, usually in
groups of four or six. Also the mamma oribis had given birth to
bouncing baby oribis, and the sight of the little ones was most
pleasing to the eyes.

Mamma and the Little One

One day I was hot on the trail of a big waterbuck. The grass
was deep at that part of the plateau and I was pushing rapidly
through it. Suddenly one of my gunbearers, who was behind,
called out and pointed to something in the grass. I hurried
back, and there lay a little oribi only a few hours old and
with big, wondering eyes that looked gravely up at me as I bent
over it. It was plenty old enough to run and could easily have
leaped away, but there it lay as tight as if nothing in the
world could make it budge.

A Museum Specimen Must Be Preserved Entire

The Eland Is the Largest of the African Antelopes

The whole thing was as plain as could be. It was acting
under instructions. I could almost hear the mother of the oribi
tell the little one when it heard us coming to lay perfectly
quiet and not to move the least bit until she came back. Then
mamma hurried away to cover. The little oribi remembered his
instructions and followed them out to the letter. Its mamma had
told it not to move and it hadn’t. We looked at it a little
while and then said good-by and went our way. Some place near
by an anxious mother oribi was watching us with her heart in
her mouth, no doubt, and I’m sure that we had not gone many
yards before she was back to see what had happened to the
little one. It was quite an exciting adventure for the little
oribi and quite incomprehensible to the mother that he had
emerged from the peril so safely.

Another night I was going out to watch for lions. A bait had
been placed near the tree where I was stationed and I had some
hopes of seeing, if not killing, a lion. Night had already
fallen, but there was still a trace of twilight in the air as I
walked through the low scrub trees that lay between our camp
and the tree, a mile and a half away. As I was walking along I
heard a loud screaming to my left, and, looking across, I saw
an oribi trying to beat off two jackals that had seized her
young baby oribi. The jackals paid little attention to her and
she was frantic in her efforts to save her little one.

It was too dark to see my sights plainly, but I shot at both
of the jackals and sent them slinking away. I didn’t go over to
see if the little oribi was still alive, for I was certain that
it had been killed. If it were dead I didn’t want to see it and
could not help either it or its mother; if it were alive its
mother could get it safely away from the jackals. Since that
moment I have hated jackals above all animals, not even
excepting the odious hyena, and it is the chief regret of my
hunting experience in East Africa that I did not kill those two
cowardly vandals.

When the American reader picks up his paper and reads that
Colonel Roosevelt has shot a Uganda cob, it is quite natural
that he should not know what kind of a thing a cob is. If the
colonel was out shooting “singing topis” or “singing sun hats,”
why, then, should he not also shoot corn cobs or cob pipes?

The cob, sometimes spelled kob, however, is only an
antelope, although a graceful and handsome one. It is divided
into several subspecies which live in different parts of the
country. In one part will be found the large cob, almost the
size of a waterbuck, which is called Mrs. Gray’s cob, in honor
of the wife of one of the former keepers in the London zoo; in
another part is the species known as Vaughan’s cob, and in
still other parts are the dusky cob, the puku cob, the lechwi
cob, the black lechwi, the Uganda cob and Buffon’s cob.

It was Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, the remarkable
young English woman who is now dancing barefooted on the London
music stage, who killed the record head of this last named
species in Nigeria.

The Gregarious Cob

It is of the Uganda cob only that I am able to write about
from my own observation and experience. We found them only in
one place, on the banks of the Nzoia River near Mount Elgon and
the Uganda border. They never were more than four or five
hundred yards from the river and could not be driven away. If
they were startled at one point they would circle around and
quickly get back to the river at some other point. They seemed
to become homesick unless they could see the river near by. We
found them only in a short stretch of five or six miles,
although they doubtless are found all the way down the Nzoia
River to Victoria Nyanza.

The cob is a curiously reliable animal. He likes one certain
place that he is accustomed to, and nothing can drive him away.
If you see him there one afternoon, you are reasonably certain
of coming back the next afternoon and seeing him there again.
Usually they graze in some sheltered meadow along the river’s
edge, and for recreation, so far as I could see, amuse
themselves by seeing how many can get on top of one ant-hill at
one time. Some of those ant-hills were literally bristling with
cobs, one male to each five females, and in herds of from
thirty to fifty.

In architecture, the cob is nearly three feet high at the
shoulder, has beautiful, sweeping horns of a lyrate shape, has
a white patch around each eye, a white belly, and a coat of
yellow with black on the forelegs. There is no handsomer
antelope in Africa than the Uganda cob, and because it is found
in such a restricted and remote district is accountable for the
fact that one seldom sees a cob head in a collection of horns.
Comparatively few sportsmen have killed them, although they are
not hard to kill if one reaches a district where they are
found. The extreme beauty of this antelope led us to secure a
group of them for the Field Museum.

The reedbuck is another of the smaller antelopes that
carries a beautiful head, and, like nearly all of the
antelopes, comes in many varieties, or subspecies.

A Wounded Wart Hog

A Grass Fire

A Maribou Stork

Our own relations with the reedbuck were limited to the high
altitudes near the Mau escarpment and the broad, rolling,
grassy downs along the numerous streams of the Guas Ngishu
Plateau. This subspecies is called the Uganda race of the bohor
reedbuck—sometimes abbreviated to “bohor.” If you say you’ve
shot a “bohor” you will be understood to mean a bohor
reedbuck.

Reedbuck

You will find the reedbuck in the tall reeds and bulrushes
of the swamps and low places, where he finds good cover and
good feeding; and also you will find him along the low,
undulating, grass-covered hills near his water supply. In the
heat of the day they are up in the tall grass, where they
remain until along in the afternoon. They lie close, and, if
discovered, will dart off with neck outstretched in such a way
as to make it difficult to tell which is male and which
female.

I have also seen the females use every means for protecting
their lords and masters, standing up before them as they lie
secreted in the grass and seeking to divert the attention of
the hunter from the bucks to themselves. This desire to protect
the male is common to many of the antelope family, and
numberless times I have seen a band of does attempt to screen
the male and shield him from harm.

The reedbuck never travels in large numbers, seldom more
than two or three, or at most, five or six, being bunched
together.

They Watched While the Buck Ran Away

We had most of our reedbuck experiences while driving swamps
for lions. On these occasions many reedbuck would be driven out
of the cover of the reeds and rushes, and go crashing up the
slopes leading away from the swamp. On one occasion a reedbuck
lay so close that it did not stir until one of the beaters was
almost upon it, when it sprang up, nearly knocking him over,
and escaped behind the skirmish line of beaters. At other
times, after the skirmish line apparently had traversed every
foot of a swamp, reedbuck would spring up after the line had
passed, thus illustrating how close they can lie and how
effectually they can escape detection.

The reedbuck has short horns, usually between seven and ten
inches in length, but one of our party secured one set of horns
ten and a quarter inches long—an exceptionally fine head. The
reedbuck’s distinguishing characteristic is a sharp whistle,
which he sounds shrilly when alarmed.

Another beautiful antelope that we met in small numbers on
the Tana River and on the Guas Ngihsu Plateau was the bushbuck,
found in thick scrub along rivers and also in the swamps and
wet places. This animal belongs to a select little coterie of
highly prized and rare antelopes, all of which have the
distinguishing feature of a spiral horn.

The bushbuck is the smallest, and is found over nearly all
of East Africa except upon the open plains and deserts. The
females are of a dark chestnut color, and the males dark,
almost black, with white markings on the neck and forelegs. A
bushbuck with fifteen-inch horns is considered a fine prize,
although horns of nineteen inches are on record.

The other members of the same family of spiral-horned
antelopes are the kudu, the lesser kudu, the situtunga, the
nyala, the bongo, and the lordly eland, king of all antelopes
in size. The kudu is largely protected in East Africa, and in
my shooting experience I was not in a district where he was to
be found. The same was true with respect to the lesser kudu.
The nyala is a South African species and is not to be found in
British East Africa. The situtunga is a swamp dweller and is
found chiefly in Uganda and, to my knowledge, infrequently in
the East African protectorate.

The bongo is to the white sportsman what the north pole has
been to explorers for centuries. In all records of game
shooting there has been, until recently, only one white man who
has killed a bongo, although the Wanderobo dwellers of the deep
forests have killed many.

The bongo lives in the densest part of dense forests, can
drive his way through the worst tangle of vegetation, and has a
hearing and eyesight so keen that usually he sees the hunter
long before the latter sees him. A hunt after bongo means long
hours or even days of hunting the forests, with hardships of
travel so disheartening that comparatively few white sportsmen
attempt to go in after the elusive antelope. Kermit Roosevelt,
however, with the good fortune that has followed his hunting
adventures, succeeded in killing a cow and calf bongo after
only a few hours of hunting with a Wanderobo.

A few days after I heard of this piece of good luck I was
traveling across Victoria Nyanza on one of the little steamers
that ply the lake. My cabin mate was a stoical Englishman who
told me quite calmly that he had just killed a large bull bongo
a few days before. He had been visiting Lord Delamere, and
after a few hours in the forest had succeeded in doing what
only two white men had done before.

The Englishman who had this good luck was George Grey, a
brother of Sir Edward Grey, one of the present cabinet
ministers of England.

Eland

The eland is the largest of all antelopes, and we ran across
a few on the Tana River and a few on the Guas Ngishu Plateau.
Under the old game ordinance the sportsman was allowed to kill
one bull eland; under the new ordinance he is allowed to kill
none except in certain restricted districts and by special
license. The eland is as big as a bull, with spiral horns and
beautifully marked skin, and both the male and female carry
horns. Those of the latter are usually larger and slenderer,
but the skin of the female is not so handsomely marked as that
of the male.

It is hard to get near an eland, but as the bull is nearly
six feet high at the shoulders it is not especially difficult
to hit him at three hundred yards or more. The one I shot was
three hundred and sixty-five yards away and carried beautiful
horns, twenty-four and one-quarter inches in length. The head
of the great bull eland makes a wonderfully imposing trophy
when placed in your baronial halls.

In the foregoing list of antelopes I have tried to tell a
little about the types of that class of animal that I met in my
African travels—in all, sixteen species of antelope. My chief
excuse for doing it is to enable people at home to know the
difference between a topi and a sun hat and between a sing-sing
and a cob. The names of many of the African antelope family are
strange and confusing, so that it is little wonder that they
mystify people in America. There are a hundred or more kinds,
and no one can hope to know them unless he makes a business of
it.

I have not seen the grysbok, or the suni, or the dibitag, or
the lechwi, or the aoul, or the gerenuk, or the blaauwbok, or
the chevrotain, or lots of others, but who in the world could
guess what they were or what they looked like, judging only
from the names?

CHAPTER XVI

IN THE TALL GRASS OF THE MOUNT ELGON COUNTRY. A NARROW
ESCAPE FROM A LONG-HORNED RHINO. A THANKSGIVING DINNER AND A
VISIT TO A NATIVE VILLAGE

Mount Elgon is one of the four great
mountains of Africa. You can find it on the map of the dark
continent, standing all alone, just a little bit north of
Victoria Nyanza, and surrounded by names that one has never
heard of before.

The mountain is distinctly out of the picture-post-card
belt—in fact, the only belt that one will find around Elgon is
the timber belt that encircles the mountain, and perhaps also a
few that the local residents wear on Sundays and national
holidays.

The function of the latter class of belt is to keep up a gay
appearance. It is worn for looks, not warmth.

The traveler who goes to Mount Elgon will not be distracted
by sounds of civilization, except such as he takes with him. He
will travel for days without seeing a sign of human life beyond
his own following. The country west of the Nzoia River is
uninhabited and is abandoned to the elephant and the giraffe
and other animals that care not for the madding crowd. Thomas
Cook and Son have not yet penetrated that district with
schedules and time cards and luggage labels; so if your purpose
in traveling is to get a grand assortment of stickers on your
trunks and hand-bags, it is useless to include Mount Elgon in
your itinerary.

There will be days of marching through high grass, often so
deep as almost to bury yourself and your horse; hours of delay
at marshy rivers densely choked with a tangle of riotous
vegetation, and much groping about in a trackless waste for a
suitable course to follow.

Owing to intertribal warfare the Elgon district has been
closed for some time and it has only been during the last year
or so that hunting parties have again been allowed to enter.
Since that time a number of parties have been in, the Duke of
Alba among the first, and later Doctor Rainsford, Frederick
Selous and, Mr. McMillan, Captain Ashton, the Duke of
Peñaranda, Mr. Roosevelt, and a few others. Colonel
Roosevelt went only as far as the Nzoia River, but most of the
others crossed and swung up along the northeastern slopes of
the mountain where elephants are most frequently found.

Our party decided to take the southern slope,
notwithstanding we were warned that we might find the natives
troublesome and treacherous. We were also warned that we should
be going through an untraveled district where there were no
trails and where native guides could not be secured.

A Native Granary

A Chair Is a Sure Sign of Rank

Nevertheless we started and brilliantly blundered into some
most diverting adventures.

The first day’s march after crossing the Nzoia River was
through scrub country and what we considered high grass. The
next day we struck real high grass! It was so deep
that we had to burrow through it. Only the helmets of those on
horseback marked where the caravan was passing. The long line
of porters carrying their burdens were buried from view. It was
a terrible place to meet a rhino and perhaps for that very
reason we promptly proceeded to meet one.

We were riding ahead, followed by the cook and the tent
boys, and behind them was the long string of a hundred or more
porters, askaris, totos, and so forth. The end of the
line was some hundred yards behind the head. Suddenly there was
a wild cry of “faru!” (rhino).

It was disconcerting, but after one or two hurried and
flurried moments we got our heavy batteries in readiness and
prepared to sell his life as cheaply as possible. But no rhino
came. The grass was too deep to have seen him if he had come,
but we thought it was well to have a reception committee ready
just the same.

Then the rear ranks began to telescope into the front ranks.
They came forward two or three jumps at a time. They were
visibly perturbed, but presently they recovered enough to give
expert testimony.

A huge rhino had been in the grass by the trail as we came
along and had waited until the whole line had passed. Then he
jumped into the trail and charged furiously after the porters.
The latter, severally, collectively, and frantically, leaped
for their lives, dropping packs and uttering hurried appeals to
Allah.

He Estimated the Length at Four Feet

After scattering a few dozen of the rank and file from his
line of march the rhino veered off and plunged out of sight in
the tall grass. One of the porters whose veracity is
unquestioned by those who don’t know him estimated the forward
horn to be four feet long. He said the rhino charged earnestly
and with hostile intent.

A rhino charging a safari is always a pleasing
diversion—pleasing after it’s all over and diverting while it
lasts. The cry of “faru” is a good deal like “car
coming” at an automobile race. Instantly everybody is all
attention, with the attention equally divided between the rhino
and the nearest tree. If there is no tree the interest in the
rhino becomes more acute.

The thought of being impaled en brochette on the
horn of a rhino is one of the least attractive forms of mental
exertion that I know of. It is a close second to the thought of
being stepped on by a herd of elephants marching single
file.

Well, we survived the charge of the heavy brigade, and then
moved onward, ever and anon casting an alert glance at the deep
clumps of thicket along the way. Fortunately no more rhinos
appeared and the next thing we struck was Thanksgiving Day.

The proper way to celebrate that deservedly popular holiday
is not by sitting in tall grass with a can of beans and a
bottle of pickles in the foreground. This is said with all
respect to the manufacturers of beans and pickles who may
advertise in the papers.

For a time, however, beans and pickles seemed to be the
nearest outlook for us, but after a while the cook, whose
nerves had been shaken by the impetuous advance of the rhino,
arose to the demands of the occasion and set up a table upon
which soon appeared some hot tea, some bread and honey, some
beans and deviled ham, and a few knickknacks in the line of jam
and cheese. That was luncheon, and we resolved to do better for
dinner.

We told the cook all about Thanksgiving Day and what its
chief purpose was. We also told him of the beautiful
significance of the occasion, what happy thoughts it inspired,
and how much sentiment was attached to it. Then we told him to
get busy. We were in a Thanksgiving mood, being grateful that
we were not riding around on the bowsprit of the rhino, and
also because our relatives and friends at home were well at
last reports, two months old.

True, our guide, who had never been over the trail before
and who was trying to guess the way by instinct, had got us
hopelessly becalmed in a sea of high grass so that we didn’t
know where we were. But we knew what we were. We were
hungry!

In the meantime we planned and carried into brilliant
execution a grouse hunt. There were lots of grouse in the
country through which we had come and all day long coveys of
them had been whirring away from our advancing outposts. It
seemed a simple thing to go out and get a few for our
Thanksgiving dinner, so we gave orders to make camp and
consecrated the afternoon to a grouse quest.

I’ll never forget what a formidable looking party it was.
When we had spread out to comb the grass by the river side we
looked like a skirmish line of an army. There were four of us,
supported by seventeen gunbearers and porters. Our battery
consisted of four elephant guns, four heavy rifles, three light
rifles, and four shotguns. The latter were for grouse and the
others were for incidental big game which one must always be
prepared for, whether one goes out to shoot grouse or take
snapshots with one’s camera.

The Grouse Hunt

We spread out and beat two miles of perfect cover. Then we
beat it back again and finally, after all our Herculean
efforts, one lonely bird flew up and was knocked over. That was
the astounding total of our slaughter and when the army marched
back into camp with its one little grouse the effect was
laughable in the extreme. I took a photograph of the entire
group and by good luck the grouse is faintly seen suspended in
the middle.

That night, with the camp-fires burning and with our tents
almost buried in the tall grass, we celebrated Thanksgiving in
a way that must have made old Lucullus fidget in his mausoleum.
The wealth of the plains was compelled to yield tribute to our
table; eland, grouse and Uganda cob appeared and disappeared as
if by magic; the vast storehouses of Europe and America poured
their treasures upon our groaning board, and one by one we
safely put away succulent lengths of asparagus, cakes and
chocolate, wine and olives, pickles and honey, nuts and cheese,
plum pudding and coffee, and soup and salad, all in their
proper sequence and in sufficient quantities to go round and
round.

A soft moon shone down from the velvet sky and the trees of
the river bed were bathed in white moonlight as we sat by the
great camp-fire and smoked and talked and dreamed of the folk
at home.

It was an unusual occasion, one that called for a special
dispensation in the way of late hours, so it was almost nine
when we turned in and dreamed of armies of rhinos playing
battledore and shuttlecock with our bulging forms. It was a
great dinner, and to be on the safe side we complimented the
cook before we went to bed.

A Group of Ketosh Ladies

Nearly Buried in Grass

Building a Grass House

A day or two later, after blindly floundering about in a sea
of waving grass for miles and miles, and getting more and more
hopelessly lost, we stumbled upon signs of human habitation.
The first sign was a great stretch of valley in which a number
of smoke columns were ascending. Where there’s smoke there’s
folk, we thought, patting ourselves on the back for cleverness.
We knew we were approaching fresh eggs and chickens.

A little later we came upon another sign of human agitation.
Over a rise in a hill we saw a large spear, and in a few
minutes we overhauled a native guarding a herd of cattle. He
carried a spear and a shield, and over his shoulders he wore a
loose dressing sack that hung down nearly to his armpits.
Civilization had touched him lightly, in fact it had barely
waved at him as it brushed by.

We tried him with several languages—Swahili, Kikuyu, the
language of flowers, American, Masai, and the sign language,
none of which he was conversant with. Then we tried a relay
system of dialects which established a vague, syncopated kind
of intellectual contact. One of our porters spoke Kavirondo, so
he held converse with the far from handsome stranger,
translated it into Swahili, and this was retranslated into
English for our benefit.

The stranger was a Ketosh. We didn’t know what a Ketosh was,
but it sounded more like something in the imperative mood than
anything ethnological. It developed later in the day, however,
that a Ketosh is a member of the tribe of that name, and their
habitat is on the southern slopes of Elgon.

Lady and Gentleman Ketosh

The Ketoshites, or Ketoshians, as the case may be, are a
cattle- and sheep-raising tribe. In other words, a tribe in
which the women do all the manual labor while the men folk sit
on a hillside with a shield and spear and watch the herds
partake of nourishment. They are the standing army.

The Standing Army Sat Around All Day

We followed the man with the spear to a little village hard
by. The village, like all the numerous other ones that we came
to in the next few days, was inclosed in a zareba, or wall of
tangled thorn branches that encircled the village. Within the
wall were a number of low houses, six feet high, built of mud
and wattle; and within the houses, spilling over plentifully,
were large numbers of children and babies and a few women. A
gateway of tangled boughs led into the inclosure, while in one
part of the village were the curious woven wickerwork granaries
in which the community store of kaffir corn is kept. There were
no street signs on the lamp posts, probably because there were
no streets and no lamp posts.

In the first village all the men were away, evidently
waiting to see whether our visit was a hostile or a peaceful
one.

We soon established ourselves on a peace footing and after
that the warriors began to appear out of the tall grass in
large numbers from all points of the compass. They all carried
spears and shields, neither of which they would sell for love
or money. At least they wouldn’t for money. We resolved not to
try the other unless the worst came to the worst and we had to
fall back on it as a last desperate measure. I suppose they
didn’t know how soon they might need their weapons, and we
heard that the sultan had just sent out a positive order
forbidding them to sell their means of defense.

The Ketosh Are Gracefully Nonchalant

Little Shelters of Mud and Sticks

A Family Party

The first procedure when entering a district where the
natives may be unfriendly is to send out for the chief, or
sultan, as he is known in Africa. There is always a sultan to
preside over the destinies of his tribe and to take any money
that happens along. So we sent for the sultan, who was off in a
neighboring village, so they said. After a long wait, during
which we pitched our camp and offered a golden reward for eggs
and chickens, a sultan drifted in.

Slowly Being Cremated

We knew he was sultan because he carried a chair—an
unfailing sign of rank among a nation of expert sitters. He
also wore an old woolen dressing gown that had worked its way
from civilization many years before. It was built for arctic
regions, but the sultan of all the Ketoshians wore it right
straight through the ardent hours when the sun kisses one with
the fiery passion of a mustard plaster. He was slowly being
cremated and it was fascinating to watch him sizzle.

After the sultan came and seated himself with his retinue of
spearmen (dressed in the altogether save for the futile cloth
around their shoulders) grouped around him we took our seats
and began a shauri.

Shauri (rhyming with Bow’ry) is a native word
meaning a powwow or a parley and is a word that works overtime.
Everything that you do in Africa has to be preceded by a
shauri. You have a shauri if you ask a native
which road to take. Other natives hurry up, and then you stand
around and talk about it for an hour or so.

If you want to buy a chicken or a cluster of eggs there must
first be a prolonged shauri with much interchange of
views and conversation and aërated persiflage. The native
loves his shauri, and if he asks you a certain price
for a chicken and you give the price without haggling he is
greatly disappointed. In fact I have often seen them offer an
article for a certain price and then refuse to accept the money
if it is at once tendered. Later the native will accept much
less if the shauri goes with it.

Well, we had shauris to burn for a couple of days.
As soon as the first sultan had departed with presents and
words of good cheer there was a flock of other sultans that
hurried in to receive presents and to assist in
shauris. They came from far and near, and they all
carried chairs, thus proving that they were not impostors; and
the worst of it was that we couldn’t find out exactly which was
the real, most exalted sultan of the bunch. Hence we had to
give presents to many who perhaps were only amateur or
‘prentice sultans, sultans whose domains were only a little
village of half a dozen families.

The Camp Was Clogged with Sultans

For two days our camp was clogged with shauris and
sultans sitting around. We couldn’t step out of our tents
without stumbling over a sultan or two. When we would take our
baths in our tents there would be sultans and warriors peeping
in modestly from all sides. There was not a secret of our inner
life that remained intact. Even the ladies, from the
banana-bellied little girls of five and six up to the
leathery-limbed old matrons, inclusive, were not above a
feminine curiosity in things which doubtless interested them,
but didn’t concern them. The standing army of the Ketoshians
sat around all day wearing out the grass and being frequently
stumbled over.

If we asked a sultan if there were any elephants in the
neighborhood it meant at least fifteen minutes of loose
conversation through a relay of interpreters, with the final
answer boiled down to a “no” in English. For a language that
has only a few words like shauri, backsheesh,
apana, and chukula the native lingo is a most
elastic one.

There were two or three things that we had come to Mount
Elgon for and about which we desired information. The first was
“elephants,” and we found, after hours of talk, that there was
none in the vicinity. Secondly, we wanted to get food for our
men, and thirdly, we wanted guides to take us up to the ancient
cave-dwellings in the mountain and more guides to take us up to
the top of the mountain itself.

It seemed almost impossible to get satisfactory information
upon either of the last two subjects. The natives didn’t want
to part with their grain, while for their cattle they asked
outrageous prices. We were almost tempted to boycott them by
stopping eating meat for two months. They also seemed reluctant
to let us have guides to take us up to the caves and none of
them seemed to know the trails that led up into the forests and
the heights of the mountain. It was evident that only a few
ever had been up the mountain upon the slopes of which they had
spent their lives.

At the Entrance of the Great Cave

There Were Granaries in the Cave

In One of the Elgon Caves

We began to think that they wanted us to stay in their
village just so they could have the pleasure of their daily
shauris.

Finally one sultan promised to get us guides and accepted a
generous present on the strength of it; but when the time came
he failed to produce them. It was at precisely this point, to
be strictly accurate, that we abandoned the polite phraseology
of the court and told him with many exclamation points that he
would have to guide us himself or we would take steps to
dethrone him. Of course, all of this had to be strained through
two interpreters, but even then I think he caught the gist of
it. He said that he himself would guide us to the nearest and
largest cave.

We told him that we would be ready to start immediately
after luncheon. Only ourselves and a few men to carry cameras
and guns were to constitute our party, the rest of the
safari remaining in camp, from which certain embassies
were sent out to buy grain for the porters’ food.

Soon after lunch the sultan arrived and we marched away.
Little by little groups of his janissaries, mamelukes, and
other members of his official entourage joined us and by the
time we reached the slope leading up to the great cave-dwelling
we had quite an imposing procession. Most of the natives were
armed with spears and knives, and some of them had painted
their bodies with red dirt and mutton grease, and when this
coating had partly dried they had traced with their fingers
many designs in stripes down their arms and legs. Some were a
light mauve in color, but most were of a rich chocolate brown.
The effect of these designs was rather pretty, but the dripping
red oil from their hair was not pretty and on a hot day exuded
a strong, overpowering odor.

Above us, nearly a thousand feet from where we stood, boldly
visible in the face of the great cliff, was the broad ledge and
black opening of the cave. A short distance to the right of it
was a bright waterfall, looking like a ribbon, but in reality
quite broad and dropping in three stages several hundred feet.
An incline of forty-five degrees led up to the cave, while up
beyond that was the great stratum of solid rock that extends
for miles along the south of Mount Elgon and which is
honey-combed with hundreds of prehistoric cave-dwellings. A
determined foe stationed at the mouth of any one of the caves
could defend it against an enormous attacking force.

It was nearly an hour’s climb to the ledge where the cave
entrance appeared. Several naked men armed with spears stood
upon the rocks, outlined in bold and striking relief against
the velvety blackness of the cave entrance. They appeared
curious but not unfriendly as we breathlessly panted our way on
to the ledge where they stood waiting, spears in hand.

Like a Great Stage

Our first impression was one of gasping wonderment. We
seemed to stand upon a great stage of an immensity which words
can not describe. It was a stage proportioned for giants. The
rock prosscenium arched above us seventy feet and the stage was
nearly two hundred feet wide. As an audience chamber one could
look out over twenty-five thousand square miles of Central
Africa.

The dimensions and the imposing magnitude of the place
almost took one’s breath away. Two regiments of soldiers could
have marched upon that stage. There was even room for a
squadron of cavalry to manœuver. Upon the well-beaten
floor were the tracks of cattle, showing that from time
immemorial the cave people had driven in their herds for
shelter or for safety in times of tribal warfare; and in places
the solid rock was worn smooth and deep by the bare feet of
centuries of naked people.

And yet, in spite of the titanic proportions of the cave,
there was something quite homelike about it. It almost
suggested a prosperous farm-yard. There were chickens walking
about, with little chickens trotting alongside. There were
wickerwork graneries standing here and there, while around the
inner edge of the great entrance hall were little mud and stick
woven houses five feet high, which gave the effect of a small
village street.

From the front of the stage back to the row of little houses
was a distance of about one hundred feet. By stooping down one
could enter one of the little openings, to be surprised to find
himself in another little farm-yard where cattle had been
housed and where there were many evidences of the thrift and
industry of the occupants. Gourds of milk were present in
generous numbers, and as one’s eyes became accustomed to the
semi-darkness all sorts of domestic paraphernalia were
revealed.

Little separate inclosures were fenced off for human
tenantry, and the glow of embers gave a pleasant, homelike look
to the place. Cavern after cavern extended back into the cliff,
a network of them, but how far they went would be hard to tell.
Perhaps the cave in all its subterranean ramifications has
never been entirely explored.

We wandered back through some of the caverns, sometimes
stooping to get through and sometimes standing beneath domes
thirty and forty feet high. And always that queer, mystical
light, with exaggerated shadows and sometimes black darkness
ahead, where could be heard the drip, drip, drip of water in
invisible lakes. In time of siege the holders of this cave,
with granaries filled and with herds of cattle and lakes of
water, could hold the place for ever.

The tenants of the place soon became pleasant and
hospitable. Perhaps many of them had never seen white people
before, but they sat down and watched us with friendly
interest. There were many babies and they were all bright-eyed
and rugged looking.

While we were there the cattle were out on the open hills
grazing, but in the evening the long herds are driven up to
their airy stronghold and made snug for the night. And who
knows but that a great herd of cattle would add much to the
heat of the cave and make its nearly naked tenants forget that
they were high on the chilly slopes of one of Africa’s greatest
mountains?

They certainly do not dress warm. Around their arms and legs
are all sorts of brass and nickel wire wound in scores of
circles. Chains of wire and necklaces of beads encircle the
women’s throats and elephant ivory armlets are often clasped
about the arms so tight that it would seem that the natural
circulation would be hopelessly retarded. But they must be
healthy, these people who go about with only a thin sheet of
dyed cotton thrown about them, while we northerners shivered
with sweaters and warm woolen things about us.

It’s all a case of getting used to it, just as it is a case
of getting used to seeing people frankly and unconsciously
naked, as many of these people are. But after a while one even
gets used to seeing them so and regards their nakedness as one
would regard the nakedness of animals.

CHAPTER XVII

UP AND DOWN THE MOUNTAIN SIDE FROM THE KETOSH VILLAGE TO
THE GREAT CAVE OF BATS. A DRAMATIC EPISODE WITH THE FINDING OF
A BLACK BABY AS A CLIMAX

For days we had heard of wonderful
places higher up in the mountain. The information had been so
vague and uncertain we hardly knew whether to credit the
reports or simply put them down as native folk lore or
superstition. One night we interviewed Askar, one of the Somali
gunbearers.

He said he had been up the mountain a year or two before
with a Frenchman who wanted to see the mysterious natural
wonders of Mount Elgon. The Frenchman had to threaten to kill
his native guides before they would consent to lead him up in
the cold heights of the mountain to show him the places that
filled the native imagination with such fear and superstitious
dread.

There was one place, Askar said, where the water boiled out
of the ground far, far up in the mountain heights, and any
native who looked at it fell dead. Askar said he went up and
looked at it through the glasses, and then ran away.

All this queer information came out at one of our evening
camp-fire shauris. The great central camp-fire of a
safari is usually in front of the tents of the
msungu, or white people, and around it in the evening
the msungu discuss the adventures of the day and the
plans for the morrow. Each night Abdi, the neapara or
head-man, comes up to get his instructions for the next
morning, and soon afterward Abdullah, the cook, appears and
waits for his orders for the breakfast hour.

Abdullah is the color of night, and no one ever sees him
approach or go away. He simply appears and often stands only a
few feet away before any one is aware of his presence. And even
after he speaks, one sees only a row of white teeth looming up
five feet above the ground. If any important matters are to be
adjusted it is usually at the camp-fire that the things are
settled. If punishment is to be meted out to a transgressor, it
is there that the trial is held and judgment rendered.

Well, on, this night as we sat talking by the camp-fire,
Abdi, our head-man, suddenly appeared and squatted down. Soon
after up came Askar, who also squatted down, and we knew that
we were in for some unusual sort of a shauri. It was
then that Askar told of the strange mystery of the
mountain.

Curious as to Our Home Life

On the Rim of the Crater

A Birthday Dinner

“Askar says,” spoke Abdi, interpreting Askar’s imperfect
English, “that up in the mountain there is a big door and a
great cave. He went up with a Frenchman, and the guides refused
to go. Then the Frenchman threatened to kill them if they would
not go. They were frightened, because all the natives die who
go to the big door and see the boiling fountain through the
door. Askar say all the natives ran away, but the Frenchman go
on.”

“Did Askar see the door?”

“Askar says he see the door and he see the fountain through
some glasses. Then he ran away.”

Camp in the Forest

“Can Askar take us up to the cave and the big door?”

There was then a long discussion in Somali between Askar and
Abdi, which finally was briefly rendered into English. Askar
would show us the way.

We then sent for the sultan of the Ketosh tribe and
interviewed him. He was singularly reticent about the subject,
and both he and the other natives called in used all their
crude intelligence to discourage any attempt to go up into
those districts that were so full of strange, forbidding
influences. They said there were no trails, and when we said we
would go anyway, they said there was a trail, but that it was
so tangled with undergrowth and vines that one had to creep
through it, like an animal. We still said we would go, and told
the sultan to get us guides, for which we would pay well.

All this happened while we were in the Ketosh village that
lies on the slope of the mountain just beneath the great rock
wall, a thousand feet high, whose upper rim is honeycombed with
the ancient caves of the aborigines. For days we had stopped
there, endeavoring to get food and guides, and for days the
sultan and his people had placed every obstacle in the way of
our ascending higher the mysterious and comparatively unknown
mountain. The great rock escarpment shut off the view of the
peaks beyond, but we felt that if once we could scale the first
precipitous slope we would find traveling much easier on the
gentle slope of the mountain.

At last, after persuasion, threats, money, and pleading had
in turn been tried, the sultan brought his son and said that
his son would guide us.

The son was the craftiest and crookedest looking native I
had seen in Africa. After one look at him, you were filled with
such distrust and suspicion that you would hardly believe him
if he said he thought it was going to rain, or that crops were
looking up.

With this man as a guide, and with four more who were
tempted by the bright red blankets we gave, our caravan started
on one of the strangest and perhaps most foolhardy trips that
presumably sane people ever made. In the first place, probably
fewer than half a dozen white men had ever ascended Mount
Elgon. There were no adequate maps of the region, and the one
we had was woefully inaccurate. It was made as if from
telegraphic description, and the only thing in which it proved
trustworthy was that there was a mountain there and that it was
about fourteen thousand two hundred feet high, and that the
line separating British East Africa from Uganda ran through the
crater at the top.

Our delay at the Ketosh village had greatly reduced our food
supplies for the porters, and there was only enough left to
last six days. In that time we should have to ascend the
mountain and descend to some place where food supplies could be
procured. It all looked quite quixotic. We bought two bullocks,
a sheep, and a goat, and, with our guides ahead, our entire
safari of over a hundred souls turned toward the grim
heights that shot up before us.

Up to the Rim of the Crater

The trail for the first thousand feet of ascent was steep
and hard to climb. The rocks high above us were specked with
natives, who gazed down in wonder at the strange spectacle.
These were the cave-dwellers. After an hour or more we reached
the crest of the rim and then continued through elephant grass
ten feet high, then dense forest, and finally through miles of
clean, cool, shadowy bamboos—always steadily climbing. The
trail was fairly good and our progress was encouraging.

In the Belt of Bamboo

Giant Cactus Growth In the Crater

Up Twelve Thousand Feet in the Crater

There were many elephant pits in the bamboo forest, but they
were all ancient ones, half-filled with decayed leaves and
obviously unused for half a century or more. From some of them
fairly large-sized trees had grown. Sometimes in the midst of
these great, silent, light-green forests we came upon giant
trees, tangled and gnarled, with trunks twenty or thirty feet
in circumference. In vain we looked for the impassable trail
the natives had warned us to expect.

Late in the afternoon we came to a wonderful cave, over the
mouth of which a wonderful fan-shaped waterfall dropped seventy
feet or more. My aneroid barometer indicated an elevation of
eighty-two hundred feet, showing that we had climbed
twenty-seven hundred feet since morning. We found a little
clearing in the bamboo forest and pitched our tents on ground
that sloped down like the roof of a house. The clearing was
barely fifty yards long, yet our twenty or more tents were
pitched, our horses tethered in the middle, and the camp-fires
crackled merrily as the chill air of night came down upon us.
From the forest came the multitude of sounds that told of
strange birds and animals that were out on their nocturnal hunt
for food.

Early in the morning the safari was sent on with
the guides while we remained to explore the cave. It was an
immense cavern, with an entrance hall, or foyer, about thirty
feet high and a hundred feet in length. Along the inner edge
were the crumbling remains of little mud and wattle huts that
had been occupied by people a long time before. Beyond this
great entrance hall were passages that led into other vast,
echoing caverns with domes like those of a cathedral.

Countless thousands of bats darted about us as our voices
broke the silence of ages, and in places the deposits of bats
were two or three feet deep. It staggered one’s senses to think
how long these creatures had dwelt within the labyrinth of
caverns and passageways.

We explored the cave for a quarter of a mile or so,
stumbling, stooping, climbing, and sliding down precipitous
slopes. Far off in the darkness sounded the steady drip, drip,
drip of water, and several times our progress was stopped by
black lakes into which a tossed stone would tell of depths that
might be almost bottomless. We fired our shotguns and the
loosened dirt and rocks and the thunder of thousands of bats’
wings were enough to terrify the senses.

There is no telling how many centuries or ages these caverns
have stood as they stand to-day. Doubtless the wild tribes of
the mountain have occupied them for thousands of years, and
doubtless a thousand years from now the descendants of these
tribes of people and bats will still be there in the
cisternlike caverns with the broad fan of sparkling water
spreading like a beautiful curtain across the great archway of
an entrance.

That night, after hours of climbing through great forests
and across grassy slopes gay with countless varieties of
beautiful and strange flowers, we pitched our camp on a
wind-swept height eleven thousand feet up. The peaks of the
mountain rose high above us only a mile or so farther on.

When the night fell the cold was intense, and we huddled
about the camp-fire for warmth. Around each of the porters’
camp-fires the humped-up natives crouched and dreamed of the
warm valleys far below in the darkness. I suppose the cold made
them irritable, for just as we were preparing to turn in there
suddenly came a succession of screams from one of the
groups—screams of a boy in mortal terror. The sounds breaking
out so unexpectedly in the silent night were enough to freeze
the blood in one’s veins. I never heard such frantic
screams—like those that might come from a torture-chamber.

One of the porters had become infuriated by one of the
totos—small boys who go along to help the
porters—and had started in to beat him. The boy was probably
more frightened than hurt, but the matter was one demanding
instant punitive action. So Abdi immediately inflicted it in a
most satisfying manner.

Once more the silence of the mountain fell upon the camp,
but it was hours before the shock to one’s senses could be
forgotten. I never before, nor never again expect to hear
screams more harrowing or terrifying.

The next day a Martian sitting upon his planet with a
powerful glass might have seen the amazing sight of three
horses, one mule, two bullocks, a goat, and a sheep, preceded
and followed by over a hundred human beings, painfully creep
over the rim of the crater and breathlessly pause before the
great panorama of Africa that lay stretched out for hundreds of
miles on all sides. It was as though an army had ascended Mont
Blanc, and thus Hannibal crossing the Alps was repeated on a
small scale.

Leaving our horses on the rim of the crater, a few of us
climbed the highest peak, fourteen thousand three hundred and
seventy-five feet high, as registered by my aneroid barometer,
and stood where very few had stood before. Even the official
height of the mountain, as given on the maps, was found to be
inaccurate, and illustrated how vaguely the geographers knew
the mountain.

That night we camped in the crater, twelve thousand feet up,
and washed in a boiling sulphur spring that sprang from the
rocks on the Uganda side. Perhaps this was the boiling fountain
the superstitious natives feared, for it was the only one we
saw. And perhaps the great gorge through which the river
Turkwel, or Suam, flowed on its long journey north was the door
that Askar had told us about. It was the only door we saw, but
Askar said the door he meant was away off somewhere else, and
he was so vague and confused in his bearings that we felt his
information was unreliable.

The crater of Mount Elgon has long since lost any
resemblance to a volcanic crater. It is a great valley, or
bowl, surrounded by a lofty rim that in reality is a
considerable chain of mountains. The bowl is two or three miles
long and as much wide, with tall grass growing on the small
hills inside and thousands upon thousands of curious
cactus-like trees. Several mountain streams tumble down from
the gorges between the peaks and, uniting, flow out of the big
gap in one stream, the river Turkwel, which separates Uganda
from British East Africa.

In the Crater of Mount Elgon

Mount Elgon is not an imposing mountain and on most
occasions there is no snow on its peaks. Only one time during
the several weeks that we were in sight of it was its summit
capped with snow. A few species of small animals live in the
crater, but no human beings. At night ice formed in the little
pools where we camped and a furious wind, biting cold, swept
down from the peaks and eddied out of the great gap where the
Turkwel flows.

To all of our safari it was a welcome hour when we
struck camp, preparatory to leaving the crater for the lower
levels. The guides said there were only two ways out—one by
the Turkwel gorge and the other by the route up which we came.
The former might lead us far from any sources of food supplies,
which by that time were becoming imperatively necessary, and
the latter was undesirable unless as a last resort. After some
deliberation we resolved to climb over the eastern rim and
strike for the Nzoia River. No one had ever been known to take
this course, but we felt that we could cut our way out and make
trails sufficient to follow.

The guides refused to go, because by doing so they would
enter a district where they might encounter tribes that were
hostile to their own. On one side of this mountain there was a
bitter tribal war even then under way. So we cheerfully said
good-by to the Elgonyi guides and slowly climbed the rock rim
and started for the unknown.

A Deserted Wanderobo Village

Where We Had Our Thanksgiving Day Lunch

For two days we climbed downward, sometimes along ancient
elephant trails and sometimes along the sheep trails made by
the flocks of mountain tribes. Several times we came upon
deserted Wanderobo villages, and it was evident the natives who
occupied them were abandoning their homes in terror before our
descending column. Sometimes we groped our way through great
forests in which there was no trail to follow, and sometimes we
cut our way through dense jungle thickets like a solid wall of
vegetation.

Galloping Lions

Upon several occasions we came to impassable places where an
abrupt cliff would necessitate a tiresome return and a new
attempt. Once we came to a little clearing in the vast forest
where the grass was like a lawn and where towering trees rose
like the arches of a great cathedral a hundred feet above. It
was the most beautiful, serene and majestic spot I have ever
seen. Even the religious grandeur of Nikko’s cryptomeria aisles
was incomparable to this.

One afternoon our column found itself hopelessly lost in a
jungle growth so dense that one could penetrate it only by
cutting a tunnel through, and for hours we hacked and hacked
and made microscopic progress. At last the head of the column
came to an abrupt drop of a couple of hundred feet which seemed
an effectual bar to all further progress. The cliff fell off at
an angle of sixty degrees, with the slope densely matted with
heavy scrub and underbrush. It was necessary either to retrace
our steps through that long and heart-breaking jungle or else
find a way down the cliff. The water was gone and the horses
must be got to water before night.

Then, followed the most dramatic episode of our trip. We
simply fell over the cliff, plunging, caroming, and ricocheting
down through the masses of vegetation. How the horses got down
I shall never know and shall always consider as a miracle. And
how the burden-bearing porters managed to get their loads down
is even more of a mystery.

Somewhere down below we heard the cry of a baby!

That meant that there must be human habitation near and, of
course, a mountain stream, and perhaps guides to lead us out of
the mountain fastness. A few moments more of falling and
sliding and plunging, and the advance guard came into a tiny
clearing where a fire was burning. A rude Wanderobo shack,
built around the base of a towering tree from which fell great
festoons of giant creepers, stood in the center of the
clearing. Some food, still hot, was found in the vessels in
which it had been cooking. The people had fled and had been
swallowed up in the silent depths of the forest.

Coming Down the Mountain

We called and shouted, but no answer came. Some of our
porters proceeded to rob the shack of its store of wild honey,
but were apprehended in time and were threatened with violent
punishment if it continued. Then we prepared to make camp.
There was no space for our tents, and trees had to be cut down
and a little clearing made. Here the tents were huddled
together, clinging to the sloping mountain side. Darkness fell,
and then a most wonderful thing happened.

One of the tent boys who was searching for firewood in the
darkening forest found a little naked baby, barely three months
old. It had been thrown away as its mother, as she thought,
fled for her life. The baby was brought into camp, wrapped up,
and cared for, and it will never know how near it came to being
devoured by a leopard or a forest hog. It was the crying of
this baby that we heard, and we assumed that its mother had
cast it aside so that its wailing would not betray the
hiding-place of the remainder of her family. One can only
imagine what her terror must have been to make this sacrifice
in the common interest.

Now, a three-months-old baby is a good deal of a problem for
a safari to handle. In our equipment we had made no
provision for the care of infants. We could wrap it up and keep
it warm, and feed it canned milk, but I imagine the proper care
of a little babe requires even more than that. It was
imperative that we find the mother before the baby died.

A Tent Boy Found It

So we first enjoined our mob of porters, who are chronically
noisy, to be quiet under penalty of a severe kiboko
punishment. We then sent out Kavirondo, the big, good-natured
porter who always acted as our interpreter when dealing with
the natives of the mountain district. He spoke the dialects of
the Wanderobo tribes. He was a messenger of peace, and he was
told to shout out through the forest that we were friendly,
that we had the baby, and that the mother should come and get
it. We felt absolutely certain that the sound of his voice
would carry to where the mother was hidden.

For an hour or more we heard the strong voice of Kavirondo
crying out his message of peace, and yet no answering cry came
from the black depths of the forest. It began to look as if we
were one little black baby ahead. In the meantime the baby was
behaving beautifully. It was wrapped warmly in a bath towel and
seemed to enjoy the attention it was receiving. Some one
suggested that we leave it in the shack and then all retire so
that the mother could creep in and recover it. But this had one
objection—a leopard might creep in first.

We cooked our dinner and away off in the forest came the
echoing shouts of Kavirondo. The camp settled down to quiet and
the camp-fires twinkled among the towering trees. Then some one
rushed in to say that the father and mother had come in.

“Kavirondo”

Outlined Against the Sky

A Reception Committee

Kavirondo had restored the baby! There was an instant
impulse to rush down to see the glad reunion, but better
counsel prevailed. Such a charge, en masse, even
though friendly, might frighten the natives away. So Akeley
alone went down and assured the father and mother that we were
friendly and that nothing would harm them. And when he came
back it was to report that the parents and the little baby were
peacefully installed in their forest home again.

She Threw Her Baby Away

Early in the morning we went down to see our strange
friends. They had greatly increased in number during the night.
There were now one man, two of his wives, an old woman, and
eight children, and the tiny baby. All fear had vanished, and
they seemed certain that no harm was likely to come to
them.

The man was a good-looking, strongly built native with fine
honest eyes. The women were comely and the children positively
handsome. I have never seen such a healthy, fine-eyed,
well-built assortment of childhood, ranging all the way from
three months up to eight or nine years of age. He was the
president of the Anti-Race Suicide Club. We gave them all
presents—beads to the children and brass wire to the women. We
also made up a little fund of rupees for the baby, although
money seemed to mean nothing to any of them. They had never
seen white men before and probably knew nothing of metal money.
Beads and brass wire were the only currency they knew. We tried
to photograph them, but the shades in the forest were deep and
the light too was bad for successful pictures.

Little by little we got their story.

There was warfare between the forest people and the savage
Kara Mojas to the north. Neither side could ever tell when a
band of the foe would swoop down upon them, killing the men,
stealing the sheep and seizing the women. Only a few months
before one of the Kara Mojas had come in and stolen some sheep
and in return our Wanderobo friend had sallied forth, killed
the Kara Moja, and captured his wife. It was the latter who was
now the mother of the little baby, and she seemed quite
reconciled to the change.

The Wanderobos’ Home

When, the night before, the little family around the
camp-fire heard the crashing of brushes and the hacking of
underbrush and the shouts of our porters they thought a great
force of the Kara Mojas was upon them. So they fled in terror.
The baby cried, and, fearful that its wails would betray their
hiding-place, they had cast it away in the bushes. Then they
had fled into the depths of the forest and, huddled together in
silent fear, waited in the hope that the Kara Mojas would
leave. Finally they heard Kavirondo’s shouts and then after
hours of indecision they decided to come in.

That is the end of the story. The Wanderobo, grateful to us,
led us by secret trails out of the wilderness, or as far as he
dared to go. He led us to the edge of the enemy’s country and
then returned to his forest home.

In a couple of days of hard marching, one of which was
through soaking torrents of rain, without food for ten hours,
we reached the Nzoia River. Our mountain troubles were
overs.

CHAPTER XVIII

ELECTRIC LIGHTS, MOTOR-CARS AND FIFTEEN VARIETIES OF WILD
GAME. CHASING LIONS ACROSS COUNTRY IN A CARRIAGE

Nairobi is a thriving, bustling
city, with motor cars, electric lights, clubs, race meets,
balls, banquets, and all the frills that constitute an
up-to-date community. Carriages and dog-carts and motorcycles
rush about, and lords and princes and earls sit upon the
veranda of the leading hotel in hunting costumes. Lying out
from Nairobi are big grazing farms, many of them fenced in with
barbed wire; and the peaceful rows of telegraph poles make
exclamation points of civilization across the landscape. It
doesn’t sound like good hunting in such a district, does it?
Yet this is what actually happened:

We had discharged our safari, packed up our tents,
and were just ready to start to Mombasa to catch a ship for
Bombay. A telegram unexpectedly arrived, saying that the boat
would not sail until three days later, so we decided to put in
two or three more mornings of shooting out beyond the limits of
the city.

We got a carriage, a low-necked vehicle drawn by two little
mules. It was driven by a young black boy, and we got another
boy from the hotel to go along for general utility purposes.
Into this vehicle we placed our guns, and at seven o’clock in
the morning drove out of the town. In fifteen or twenty minutes
we had passed through the streets and had reached the pleasant
roads of the open plains. Soon we passed the race-track and
then bowled merrily along between peaceful barbed-wire fences.
Occasional groups of Kikuyus were tramping along the road,
bringing in eggs or milk to Nairobi. A farm-house or two lay
off to either side, and once or twice we passed boys herding
little bunches of ostriches.

At about a quarter to eight we drove up the tree-lined
avenue of a farm-house and a pleasant-faced woman responded to
our knock. We asked for permission to shoot on the farm and
were told that we were quite welcome to shoot as much as we
wished.

Five minutes later, less than an hour’s drive from Nairobi,
we drove past a herd of nearly sixty impalla. They watched us
gravely from a distance of two hundred yards. At this point we
left the well-traveled road and drove into the short prairie
grass that carpeted, the Athi Plains. The carriage bumped
pleasantly along, and as we reached a little rise a few hundred
feet away, the great stretch of the plains lay spread out
before us.

Mount Kenia, eighty or ninety miles north, was clear and
bright with its snow-capped peaks sparkling in the early
sunlight. Off to its left rose the Aberdare Range, with the
dominating peak of Kinangop; to its right rose the lone bald
uplift of Donyo Sabuk, and to the east were the blue Lukenia
Hills. The house-tops of Nairobi waved miragically in the
valley, with a low range of blue hills beyond. Across the
plains ran the row of telegraph poles that marked the course of
the railway and a traveling column of smoke indicated the busy
course of a railway train. This was the setting within which
lay the broad stretches of the Athi Plains, billowing in waves
like a grass-covered sea.

A Nest of Ostrich Eggs

A Herd of Ostriches

We Bumped Merrily Along

As we drove along big herds of zebras paused in their
grazing to regard the carriage as it merrily bumped across the
hills. As long as we remained in the vehicle they showed no
alarm, for they had seen many carriages along the neighboring
roads. It was only when the carriage stopped that they showed
an apprehensive interest. Great numbers of Coke’s hartebeest
watched us with humorous interest. An eland grazed peacefully
upon a distant hill, and a wart-hog trotted away as we
approached. Immense numbers of Thompson’s gazelle skipped away
merrily and then turned to regard us with widespread ears and
alert eyes. Two Grant’s gazelles were seen, while far off upon
a grassy hillside were many wildebeest—the animal that we were
seeking. It was impossible to get close enough to shoot
effectively, and after a time we gave up our attempts in that
direction.

The wildebeest, although living so near Nairobi, are most
wild, and with miles of plains stretching out upon all sides it
is easy for them to keep several hundred yards of space between
themselves and danger. We spent a couple of hours of fruitless
stalking and then were obliged to hurry back to town in order
to be at the hotel when the tiffin bell rang.

I had not yet secured a Thompson’s gazelle, so we stopped
and each of us shot one on our way to the road. Then we
returned to town. People along the streets regarded us with
surprised interest, for there were two gazelles hanging out of
the carriage and our four rifles gave the vehicle an
incongruously warlike aspect.

Shooting Wildebeest (Cross Marks Location of
Wildebeest, Outward Bound)

The next morning at seven o’clock we were again in our
carriage. We drove out to the same place and at a few minutes
after eight we were amazed to see a wild dog rise from the
grass and look at us. We hastily jumped out of the carriage and
walked toward him. In a moment a number of others rose from the
grass, until we saw seventeen of them. This animal is seldom
seen by sportsmen, and I believe it is considered quite rare.
In four months only one of our party had previously seen any.
Sometimes they savagely attack human beings, and when they do
their attack is fierce and hard to repel. They watched us
narrowly as we approached them and then moved slowly away. They
seemed neither afraid nor ferocious.

We each shot and missed. The pack split, and Stephenson
followed one little bunch while I followed another. My course
led me toward a shallow, rock-strewn nullah, and once or twice
I fired again at the wild dogs. But I couldn’t hit them. There
was nothing remarkable in my failure to make a good shot, but
Stephenson, who is a celebrated rifle shot, seemed to be
equally unfortunate in his work. He was some distance away and
his bullets would not go where he wanted them to go.

Suddenly my attention was riveted upon three forms that
walked slowly out of the nullah and climbed the slope on the
other side, about three hundred and fifty yards away. I was
transfixed with amazement and could hardly believe my eyes.

They were lions!

One was a female and the other two immense males. They were
walking slowly, and once or twice they stopped to look back at
me. Then they resumed their stately retreat.

As soon as I recovered from my astonishment I shouted to
Stephenson, who had been lured far away by the wild dogs.

“Simba!” I yelled, pointing to the three lions.

He seemed not to comprehend, and I saw him reluctantly turn
from the dogs and fix his glasses upon the direction I
indicated. In no time he was hurrying up to join me, and we
hastily formed a plan of campaign. The lions had now
disappeared over the brow of the hill. I looked at my watch and
the hour was not yet nine o’clock. We were still in sight of
the distant house-tops of Nairobi. It seemed unbelievable.

We crossed the nullah and the carriage jolted down and
across a few minutes later. We took our seats and studied the
plains with our glasses. The lions were not in sight. Then we
studied the herds of game and saw that many of them were
looking in a certain direction. We drove in that direction and
whipped up the mules to a lively trot. In a few minutes
Stephenson picked up the three lions far to the left, where
they were slowly making their way toward another ravine a mile
or so beyond.

Then began one of the strangest lion hunts ever recorded in
African sporting annals.

You may have read of the practice of “riding” lions. Doctor
Rainsford, in his splendid book on lion hunting, describes this
thrilling sport in such vivid words that you shiver as you read
them. Mounted men gallop after the lion, bring it to bay, and
then hold it there until the white hunter comes up to a close
range and shoots it. In the meantime the cornered beast is
charging savagely at the horsemen, who trust to the speed and
quickness of their mounts to elude the angry rushes of the
infuriated animal. It is a most spectacular method of lion
hunting and is only eclipsed in danger and daring by the native
method of surrounding a lion and spearing it to death.

A Kikuyu Woman Uses Her Head

On the Athi Plains

It Was a Rakish Craft

To my knowledge, no one has ever “galloped” a lion in a
carriage drawn by two mules, and probably few hunters have ever
galloped three lions at one time under any conditions.

It was a memorable chase. The mules were lashed into a
gallop and the carriage rocked like a Channel steamer. We were
gaining rapidly and the distance separating us from the lions
was quickly diminishing. It seemed as if the three lions were
not especially eager to escape, for they moved away slowly, as
if half-inclined to turn upon us.

It Rocked Like a Channel Steamer

We hoped to overtake them before they reached the ravine or
such uneven ground as would compel us to abandon the
carriage.

Five hundred yards! Then four hundred yards, and soon three
hundred yards. The mules were doing splendidly, and we knew
that we should soon be within good shooting distance. At two
hundred and fifty yards the largest of the two males, a great,
black-maned lion, stopped and turned toward us. His two
companions continued moving away toward the ravine.

Thinking it a good moment to strike, we leaped from the
carriage and knelt to fire. Stephenson shot at the big
black-mane and I at the male that was retreating. Both shots
missed. The black-mane resumed his retreat and we got in a
couple more ineffectual shots before the three lions
disappeared over the brow of the ravine.

At Two Hundred and Fifty Yards

Once more in the carriage and another wild gallop as far as
the vehicle would go. For a few moments we lost sight of the
lions, but presently we saw them climbing up the opposite
slope, four hundred yards away. It was a long distance to
shoot, but we hoped to bring them to bay at least by wounding
them into a fighting mood. The large lion turned and swung
along the brow of the hill; the others disappeared over the
opposite side, but they soon reappeared some distance farther
to the right.

Little spurts of dirt showed where our bullets were
striking. Once I kicked up the ground just under him and once a
shot from Stephenson passed so close to his nose that he ducked
his head angrily.

We became frantic with eagerness and continued
disappointment. The thought of losing the finest lion we had
seen on the whole trip was maddening, yet it seemed impossible
to hit him.

Then he disappeared and probably rejoined his companions in
a retreat that led down into the ravine where it wound far away
from us. There were patches of reeds in the ravine and it was
there that I thought they would hide.

Sending the carriage in a wide detour, we climbed across a
spur of the ravine and tried to pick up the trail. Once I fell
upon the rocks that lined the steep sides of the gully and cut
my hand so deeply that the scar will always remain as a
reminder of that eventful day. Stephenson kept to the top of
the ridge, believing that the lions would continue across the
ravine; I went into the ravine, thinking they would take cover
in the reeds and might be scared out with a shot or two.

But nothing could be seen of them, and after half an hour we
rejoined on the top of the hill, where a wide view of the whole
country was revealed.

We sat down in despair. The greatest chance of the whole
trip was gone.

“That’s the last we’ll see of them,” said I oracularly as I
sat upon a stone. My hand was covered with blood, but alas! it
was mine and not the lion’s.

The carriage appeared and we held a prolonged consolation
meeting. Suddenly our general utility boy, Happy Bill, uttered
a low cry of warning. We turned, and there, in the valley ahead
of us, the three lions were again seen. They had evidently
passed through the reeds without stopping and had continued
across only a few yards from where we were now standing.

Fate seemed determined to give us plenty of chances to get
these lions. Again we opened fire on them at about four or five
hundred yards. My big-gun ammunition was gone, so I fired with
my .256.

No result! The distance was too great and our bombardment
was fruitless. The black-maned lion was in a bad humor and
repeatedly turned as if intent to stop and defend his outraged
dignity. In a few moments the three lions disappeared in the
tall grass that fringed a big reed bed many acres in
extent.

For an hour we raked the reed bed with shot, hoping to drive
them from cover. But that was the last we saw of the lions. A
little bunch of waterbuck does were scared up, but nothing
else. The lions were now safe, for nothing less than fifty
beaters could hope to dislodge them from the dense security of
the swamp.

It Would Have Been Historic

Talk about dejection! Our ride back to town was as mournful
as a ride could be. We thought of the glory of driving through
the streets of Nairobi with a lion or two hanging over the back
of the carriage. It would have been historic. Citizens would
have talked of it for years. It would have taken an honored
place in the lion-hunting literature of Africa, for no lion
hunters have ever pursued a band of lions in a carriage and
brought back a carriage-load of them.

We almost regretted having had the chance that we so
heartbreakingly lost.

But we told about it when we struck town, and before the day
was over it was the topic in hotels and clubs throughout the
whole town of Nairobi. Everybody who had a gun was resolved to
go out the next day, and interest was at a fever pitch.

We went out again the following morning, shot at wildebeests
at all known ranges, from two hundred yards up to five hundred
yards—but our luck was against us. We came back empty-handed,
and our chief reward for the morning’s work was the great
privilege of seeing both Mount Kenia, ninety miles north, and
Kilima-Njaro, nearly two hundred miles southeast, as clear as a
cameo against the lovely African sky.

The lesson of this story is not so much a review of bad
shooting or of bad luck. The thing that seems most noteworthy
is that within six or seven miles from Nairobi, nearly all the
time within sight of the house-tops of that town, we had seen
fifteen varieties of wild game, some of which were present in
great numbers.

Wildebeest

Hartebeest

Hyena

Jackal

Thompson’s Gazelle

Lion

Rabbit

Waterbuck

Impalla

Giant Bustard

Ostrich

Wart-hog

Wild Dog

Steinbuck

Grant’s Gazelle

Surely there is still some game left in Africa.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LAST WORD IN LION HUNTING. METHODS OF TRAILING,
ENSNARING AND OTHERWISE OUTWITTING THE KING OF BEASTS. A
CHAPTER OF ADVENTURES