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Updated: July 18, 2025
Senhor Silva told us that he once saw a battle between a large male elephant and a rhinoceros, when, after an encounter of some minutes, the elephant, who had at first shown great courage and activity, turned tail and fled, the blood flowing from the wounds he had received. He once also saw a battle between four enormous rhinoceroses.
I never could get on very well with rhinoceroses, but the large deer, bison, and wild cattle have the quality detected by Mr. Butler. So has the gorgeous, well-grown tiger, in full measure, when he purrs in answer to one's voice: but the lion is pompous, irritable, and easily upset. He never purrs. He is unpleasantly and obscurely spotted.
Fundi needed a little wholesome discipline. He was forgetting his porter days, and was rapidly coming to consider himself a full-fledged gunbearer. The occasion soon arose. We were returning from a buffalo hunt and ran across two rhinoceroses, one of which carried a splendid horn. B. wanted a well developed specimen very much, so we took this chance.
All day long it remains sleepily hanging under a bough, and only wakes up when night falls. It lives only on trees and eats leaves. In far-back ages there were sloths as large as rhinoceroses and elephants. We have, too, the raccoon in a greyish-yellow coat, also a nocturnal animal, which sleeps during the day in a hollow tree.
Elephants and rhinoceroses, giraffes and zebras, hippopotami and wild boars, buffaloes and antelopes occurred in large numbers, and the northern extremity of the lake swarmed with crocodiles. Sometimes the strangers were inhospitably received when they landed, and once when they were off their guard the natives plundered their canoes.
It was quite impossible to follow the animal through the jungle of hooked thorns. On our way toward the camp we saw tracks of rhinoceroses, giraffes, buffaloes, and a variety of antelopes, but none of the animals themselves. On the following morning we started, several times fording the river to avoid the bends: our course was due east.
Thus we never had our safari scattered by rhinoceroses in the former district, while in the latter the boys were up trees six times in the course of one morning!
"Teeth?" spluttered the genteel lunatic; "teeth?" "Yes," cried Turnbull, advancing on him swiftly and with animated gestures, "why does teething hurt? Why do growing pains hurt? Why are measles catching? Why does a rose have thorns? Why do rhinoceroses have horns? Why is the horn on the top of the nose? Why haven't I a horn on the top of my nose, eh?"
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.
The perfect preservation of the carcasses of the Siberian elephants and rhinoceroses is certainly one of the most wonderful facts in geology; but independently of the imagined difficulty of supplying them with food from the adjoining countries, the whole case is not, I think, so perplexing as it has generally been considered.
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