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Updated: June 5, 2025
The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape and rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective mien of the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa and the wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot, if such things as these do not testify to a sense of humour in the Creative Spirit, it is hard to account for the fact that in man a perception is implanted which should find such sights pleasurably entertaining from infancy upwards.
I used to like starting them off this way, just for the sake of contrast, and also for the sake of the delicious but impossible vision of seeing their human prototypes do likewise. When a wart-hog is at home, he lives down a hole. Of course it has to be a particularly large hole. He turns around and backs down it.
No more peculiar sight can be imagined than the sardonically toothsome countenance of a wart-hog fading slowly in the dimness of a deep burrow, a good deal like Alice's Cheshire Cat. Firing a revolver, preferably with smoky black powder, just in front of the hole annoys the wart-hog exceedingly. Out he comes full tilt, bent on damaging some one, and it takes quick shooting to prevent his doing so.
The country was harsh and dry and beautiful with the grays and dull greens of arid-land brush, or with the soft atmospheric tints of arid-land distances. Game was fairly common, but rather difficult to find. There were many buffalo, a very few zebra, leopards, hyenas, plenty of impalla, some sing-sing, a few eland, abundant wart-hog, Thompson's gazelle, and duiker.
At night the roar of lions may now and then cause them to turn in their sleep, and in their dreams they may have visions of the animals that have charmed them during the day the stately eland, the graceful roan and sable antelopes, the ungainly wildebeeste, and the funny old wart-hog, trotting along with high action and tail erect.
During the seven days since we had left Kijabe, the expedition had roped and photographed a cheetah, a serval-cat, a hartebeest, an eland, and a wart-hog. Although we had been given no opportunity yet to find out how we were going to hold a rhino or what we would do when the lion charged, still, in addition to our success with the lesser animals, we had acquired something else of value.
The hunter is allowed under his two hundred and fifty dollar license, about one hundred and ninety-five animals, comprising thirty-five species, and not including lion, leopard, wart-hog and hyena. There is no restriction on the number of these last-named species that one is allowed to shoot, but there is on the number that he gets the opportunity of shooting.
Once, many hundreds of miles south of the Tana, and many months later, we were riding quite peaceably through the country, when we were startled by the sound of a deep and continuous roaring in a small brush patch to our left. We advanced cautiously to a prospective lion, only to discover that the roaring proceeded from the depths of a wart-hog burrow.
The buffalo and the elephant, the wart-hog and the reed-buck, roam and feed and sleep together. Nor do they trouble, after three days' residence in that pleasant sanctuary, about man except that specimen of man who brings them food.
So it came to pass that by the time I could safely leave Schneider to the others, I found myself unwontedly incarnating the spirit of criticism. They were a motley crowd, coalesced for the moment into a vinous solidarity. Follet spat his words out very sweetly; his poisonous grace grew on him in his cups. Lockerbie, warmed by wine, was as simple and charming as a wart-hog.
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