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Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
Some dry grass was piled inside, with blankets spread over it to prevent rustling; and when night came we three, myself and two gunbearers, wormed our way in and then pulled some pieces of brush into the opening after us. The rifles were sighted on the bait while it was still daylight and at a spot where the expected lion might appear. Then we waited.
* Except in the greatest emergencies a gunbearer would never think of carrying any sort of a burden. This was pleasing, but it would never do, at this stage of the game, to let him think so, neither on his own account nor that of the real gunbearers. "You will bring in meat today also," said I, for I was indeed a little shorthanded, "and you will learn how to make the top incision straighter."
At the first gray we were afoot and on the march. F. and I, with our gunbearers, then pushed ahead down the river, leaving the men to come along as fast or as slowly as they pleased. After about six hours or so of marching, we picked out a good camp site, and lay down to await the safari. By two o'clock in the afternoon camp was made. Also it was very hot.
That, strangely enough, is a sound to which wild animals seem to pay no attention, and is therefore most useful as a signal. We looked back. The three gunbearers were staring to the right of our course. About a hundred yards away, on the steep side hill, and partly concealed by the brush, stood two rhinoceroses. They were side by side, apparently dozing.
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.
They seemed to bulk fully a third larger than my expectation. The magnificent beasts stood only long enough to see clearly what had disturbed them, then turned, and in two bounds had gained the shelter of the thicket. Now the habit in Africa is to let your gunbearers carry all your guns. You yourself stride along hand free.
Also the mamma oribis had given birth to bouncing baby oribis, and the sight of the little ones was most pleasing to the eyes. 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.
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.
The animals were feeding about fifty yards the other side of a small solitary bush, and the bush grew on the sloping bank of the slight depression that represented the dry stream bottom. We could duck down into the depression, sneak along it, come up back of the little bush, and shoot from very close range. Leaving the gunbearers, we proceeded to do this.
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