Part 15 (1/2)

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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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.

[Drawing: _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 pa.s.ses his way. If I have anything on my conscience, it is certainly not the remorse of having reduced the supply of wildebeests.

[Drawing: _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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumed 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 Defa.s.sa, or ”sing-sing” waterbuck, which is found in the higher alt.i.tudes 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 n.o.ble 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 s.h.i.+er 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.

[Drawing: _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, n.o.ble, 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 coa.r.s.e 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.

[Photograph: A Uganda Cob]