Directly we showed our heads outside the jungle my man Géli pushed me back and pointed out into the centre of the stream, which lay before us, flowing deep and swift, a hundred yards broad; out in the middle appeared the head and horns of the noble waterbuck swimming for the opposite shore. It was too good a prize to lose, so, waiting till he shook the water from his flanks and cantered up the slope of stiff mud, I fired, and striking him behind the withers brought him down; and then another shot finished him. In his struggles he had slipped down the bank to within six feet of the water, and I was in a great fright lest after all his splendid head should go to the crocodiles. We ran the three miles back to camp along the margin of the water, and on reaching it I set all the men to work, cutting down the trunks of dead dry trees to form a raft, and by the afternoon it was ready.

Géli and a Gilimiss guide then poled themselves across the river, and after three hours they returned with the head. I was so anxious to measure it that I shouted to Géli to place the horn against his Snider rifle, while I marked another Snider which my men handed to me, and found that the buck’s horns could not measure much less than twenty-four inches, a large pair for the Webbe, where waterbuck horns are comparatively short. I anxiously watched the men come over with my specimen, and then I carried it to my tent. At night we had several alarms, caused by hyænas and lions, the camels rising suddenly together, running about camp, and stumbling over tent-ropes in the dark. I remained several days hunting waterbuck with great success.

While we were encamped here Adan Yusuf’s horse met with his death in rather a melancholy way. At noon the men were lying under shady trees round camp, sleeping like hogs, and I sat in my tent writing up my journal. The camels were a mile away, browsing under the care of one man, and the horse and Rás Makunan’s mule were hobbled by tying the near fore and near hind leg together, according to Somáli custom. The three milch goats and the horse and mule were allowed to wander about near camp, the man who usually looked after them, thinking I had gone to sleep, having retired to the shade of a tree to do likewise.

About an hour afterwards I heard a loud whinny from the mule, and looking out of the tent I saw her swimming out in the middle of the stream, her head bobbing up and down in the water. She was being carried down fast, so I fired a gun into the air to wake the men, and we all jumped up and ran to the edge of the water. There was a perpendicular scarp just below the site of the camp, where the swift current had undermined the bank, and towards this she was being carried. We ran to the beginning of the steep place, and two of the men, plunging into the river, caught her head as she came on with the current, and bringing her to the bank, after a hard struggle, with all hands helping, we landed her high and dry. Examining the bank, we found several long streaks in the mud showing where the mule, while drinking, had slid in; and then we went to look for Adan’s horse, and a search up and down the river only disclosed similar marks in the mud farther down stream; we never saw the horse again, and no doubt the crocodiles got him. Indeed, hobbled as she was, it was wonderful how the mule kept above water and it was lucky she had the sense to whinny, and so attract attention to her accident.

The Gilimiss guide whom we had taken from Karanleh told me that we should be attacked by the Aulihán if we followed the river down as far as Burka, and represented the Aulihán to be very dangerous people. But I found, upon questioning my own men, that the guide had lately been concerned in the killing of an Aulihán, and that tribe naturally wanted his blood; so, to avoid trouble, I dismissed him and went on without a guide. This was not difficult, because a good native path followed the course of the river, and we were never so far from the bends that we could not bring from them, in our casks, the water for camp use.

On 5th September we arrived at a low precipitous hill called Burka, shooting a bull oryx on the way. We met some of the Aulihán who were watering their flocks, and on 6th September we followed them to their karias, which were some distance inland. The name of this sub-tribe was Rer Afgab, Aulihán. They gave us milk and a display on horseback; and they asked us to go to their country to shoot, stating they would barter cattle in exchange for cloth, and that if I took the cattle afterwards to the Gállas in the Wéb country I would get plenty of ivory.

On 7th September, finding that the giraffe ground was at least four days to the south of Burka, we marched back towards Karanleh, to be ready to meet Dubbi Harré on the day appointed. We made a long march to our old camp at Ellán, where I had lost the horse, and thence we went to Yahia’s village. Dubbi Harré had not yet arrived, so we retraced our steps down the river to shoot for a few days, halting at a place called Shendil. Our camp was pitched on open ground outside a belt of forest some four miles long by one mile deep, fringing the Webbe. On the northern bank, opposite to Shendil, was Sen Morettu, where we had first struck the river a fortnight before. To the south of us lay an even plain gradually rising towards the Gálla mountains, being covered in alternate patches of thick thorn bush and glades of long, coarse, buffalo grass.

The operation of pitching camp was interrupted by a row between two of my men, one of whom had two fingers broken by the descending butt of a Snider rifle, which had been intended for his head. Having held an inquiry, and disarmed and placed the culprits under supervision at opposite ends of the camp, to let them cool down, I went out into the thick bush to the south and had some exciting shooting, getting two very fine waterbuck.

On the 12th I went out shooting on a wide open plain which had been cleared by fire, only the leafless trees with charred stems being left standing above the black ground; young grass, always very attractive to game, had begun to spring up, and here I shot two more waterbuck, both carrying good heads. In the evening, going into the high forest by the river to look for the dól, or bushbuck, to our astonishment we came to some very large bovine tracks, which my guide, a Gilimiss, at once pronounced to be those of wild buffalo. There were two old bulls. We followed them in and out among the glades and thick cover near the margin of the river, and found the marks where they had lain and rolled in the mud during the previous night; but it became dark before we could come up with them. My guide, a Midgán, said that four bull buffaloes had strayed from the Gálla country a few years before, and that his father had shot two of them with poisoned arrows, those which we were hunting being the two survivors; and I am inclined to think these two were perhaps the only specimens on the Webbe, for I had always been told that buffalo did not exist anywhere near Somáliland.

I made a very strong zeríba while we were halted here; for the Aulihán at Burka told me that the Gállas were constantly raiding down to the river, and that while on the southern side we were liable to attack, owing to the strong antipathy to white men which had sprung up in Gállaland. We were reminded of the insecurity of the border by passing the skeletons of two Gállas, who a month before had been promptly killed by the Aulihán “because they looked like robbers.” Their unburied bodies had been cleaned by vultures, and left to lie in the long grass by the side of the path; and whenever, attended by my two hunters, I went out to shoot on the burnt ground west of camp, we passed them; and the grinning skulls made us involuntarily feel along our cartridge belts to see that they were not empty. This condition of insecurity is very uncomfortable, and it is also a great nuisance when one is out shooting, as when hunting dól in the thick bush one cannot hope for success if attended by more than two men, because of the difficulty in moving silently; and three riflemen, miles from camp in thick bush, would make a poor defence against a strong raiding party of Gállas.

I devoted one day to a buffalo hunt, which was more exciting than successful. In the early morning we went into the forest again and came on the fresh tracks of the two buffalo, in the densest bush near the river bank, the whole jungle being composed of evergreens and a network of creepers. It was necessary to stoop and sometimes to crawl on all fours through the tunnels of vegetation; sometimes five or six creepers clinging around arms and legs held me fast, so that it would have been impossible to shoot; I had to go bareheaded because of the tangled vines which constantly swept off my canvas hat; but this did not matter, because the density of the forest afforded protection from the sun’s rays,—indeed there was perpetual twilight inside. Underfoot were the débris of all kinds of timber, almost impossible to climb over without making some noise. The whole jungle smelt of monkeys. They could be seen overhead covering the branches in clusters, their chattering giving notice of our approach as we stole along. There were two kinds: the large dog-faced baboon, different from those found in the mountains of Somáliland chiefly in the absence of the full gray mane; and a small tree monkey, whose scientific name I am ignorant of.

After creeping about noiselessly for the space of two hours with Géli and Hassan, I put up the buffalo at a distance of about twenty yards, but we could only hear the heavy pounding of the earth and cracking of sticks as they galloped off, with continuous crashing through the undergrowth, and the hollow sound of the larger limbs of the trees breaking as they charged ahead. We followed, in the course of the morning putting them up no less than seven times. Once we came to their lair, at a spot in the densest line of thicket close to the river, where four large banyan-trees grew together, their roots and descending branches interlacing to form a labyrinth of caves with upright pillars. The place was nearly dark; it smelt of buffalo and was full of their droppings; one of the exits was a tunnel through the thicket about five feet high. Through this they had escaped, and finding they could not pass under a branch six inches thick, which spread horizontally across this opening at a height of four feet, they had charged it full tilt and broken it short off. Following the buffalo, we put them up again, but they broke back towards the eastern part of the jungle, the original end from which we had first driven them. I had been after them for three hours, and though we had heard their rush close to us many times we had never obtained a glimpse of them. They were dodging about in the thickest parts of the forest and would not face us among the glades.

At last I decided to go to camp and organise a drive. I assembled all the men, and sending them in at the west end, I sat with the two hunters on an old platform from which the boys were accustomed to scare birds from the crops, at the east end, and waited for the buffalo to be driven past me. The platform was a flimsy structure some six feet high, and commanded a good view of the edge of the woods and the reeds bordering the river, through which I hoped the buffalo would break.

The men from the west end of the jungle were extended to form a semicircle, and they moved towards me, firing guns and shouting. The brutes now got into a patch of the thickest bush, near where we had found their lair in the four trees growing together, so to get them out of this stronghold my men set fire to the jungle. Towards evening, when the fire was at its height, the buffalo at last made up their minds, and instead of coming into the reeds they broke back through the line of men, charging into them in spite of a shower of badly-aimed Snider bullets; and escaping from the forest, they cantered over a mile of open grass plain to the dense thorn bush and high grass on the slope leading up towards the Gálla mountains. Of course by the time I had run through the half mile of covert into the open they had disappeared. They never returned to Shendil while we were encamped there, and I have no doubt they left the country altogether.

At dusk on the evening of the 13th I went out to the burnt plain and got up to a herd of waterbuck, shooting a cow in mistake for the bull, and then wounding the bull. He got away into long grass, and night coming on I lost him. Going to follow him up next morning I first made for the body of the cow. I found that a lion had discovered it early in the night, and, eating his fill, had left the remainder to the hyænas. Following up the tracks of the lion, I found the carcase of the wounded bull, which the lion had followed up and struck down, close to a thicket of thorn bush and high grass. Part of the haunches was consumed, and the lion had apparently gone into the patch of grass to sleep or watch over the meat.

Silently sitting down behind a bush close by with my two hunters, I waited from eight o’clock till noon for the lion to come out. Vultures were perched on all the tops of the thorn-trees, and would occasionally swoop to the ground and walk round at a respectful distance from the meat; but they always took alarm again and flew back to their perches, no doubt fearing the lion would come out. Lions often watch meat in this manner by day. So still did we sit behind our screen of bushes watching the dead waterbuck that a large spotted hyæna came up to within two yards of my face without seeing me! I had to cough, otherwise he would have been right on to me, and there is no knowing what even a hyæna would do when so close. He gave one look, and the hair bristling up along his back he rushed away, coming to a halt eighty yards off to look back. Then he cantered through the jungle and I lost sight of him.

Finding the lion did not come out of the grass, we searched it through and through, and discovered that he must have heard us coming when we first found the carcase in the morning, and retired before us. So we gave it up and returned to camp. We had scarcely left the spot twenty yards behind us on our way home, when two Adone women, one of them young, plump, and almost pretty, came up and asked us for meat. We pointed to the carcase of the waterbuck, which had been partly eaten by the lion, and although it had lain under a tropical sun all the morning, they at once set to work to cut off the meat which was left, to take home for their own dinner.

The Dair, or rainy season, now coming on, the river began to rise rapidly. It was long past the time agreed upon for meeting the Gálla chief Dubbi Harré at Karanleh, and Yahia now sent me word that the Gállas had looted several animals from the Karanleh people, and fighting between the Somális and Gállas had broken out, all communication with Gállaland being thus interrupted. Finding that I had not enough leave left to go into Gállaland unless Dubbi Harré came down to Karanleh to help me, I decided to march as quickly as possible through Ogádén and the Habr Gerhajis country to the coast, four hundred miles distant.

On the 15th I went to the burnt plain and shot a very fine lesser koodoo buck, and in the evening, while marching to Yahia’s, I bagged two more waterbuck.

The next day we arrived at the ford at Karanleh, called Maaruf, where we had first crossed the river. The stream was now in flood, the bollards which we had driven into the mud had been carried away, and it took all the evening to stretch the rope across. I had not a fathom of rope to spare, and I feared that unless we could cross next day we might be kept a week or two on the southern bank through the further rising of the river. We, however, crossed with great difficulty on the following day. During the passage a freshet came down, drowning one camel and overturning a raft, with a good deal of valuable kit and a Snider rifle, several documents, amongst which were several maps, going down in thirty feet of water. The loss I felt most was that of my botanical collection. Although my men spent the whole evening diving for the things they were never recovered. I did not care to halt on the northern bank and order another day’s diving, because of the danger from crocodiles. The men had done their best, but in the strong current the efforts of even my Aden Somális, who are superb divers, were in vain.

On the following day we journeyed down the river along the northern or Somáli bank, and made two marches to the neighbourhood of Sen Morettu, halting just opposite the forest at Shendil, where I had unsuccessfully hunted buffalo a few days before. I sent men across on an Adone raft which I had caused to be towed down from Karanleh, but they returned and reported that the buffalo had not come back from the hills. On the short march to Sen Morettu I shot a very fine waterbuck and a Sœmmering’s gazelle, and the next day I shot a waterbuck and a lesser koodoo. I was anxious to get a good specimen of the dól, with a view to having it scientifically identified, so we had all the pitfalls in the neighbouring forest repaired by the Adone; but none of the bushbucks fell in while I was at Sen Morettu.

On the 21st I organised a beat for dól. I saw nothing, but one of the men in the line of beaters, Hadji Adan, shot a fine buck with his Snider. He was in company with a doe, which broke back through the line, hopping over one of the men, hitting his forehead with her hoofs, and so knocking him down! She succeeded in making good her escape, as the other men were too astonished to fire. At sunset I shot another good waterbuck.

I now marched for the coast. The return journey was over ground most of which I have previously described. We passed through several Somáli tribes, all of which were of course friendly. On the way the natives told me that the Abyssinians had received a great defeat from the Danakil tribes near Obok, and that my Abyssinian friend Basha-Basha had been killed; also that war had broken out between the Abyssinians and the Suákin dervishes. But I was unable to verify either of these reports.

During three days I made six marches, covering sixty miles, in a course running almost due north. The only game I saw on these marches was a wart-hog, which appeared staring me in the face at a distance of ten feet, as I was moving through long grass at dawn. The rising sun was shining in his eyes, and I knocked him over stone dead by a shot in the chest before he had time to realise the situation. He had a beautiful pair of tusks, long, thick, and white.

On the morning of the 26th I heard that near a karia ahead of us a man had been lately attacked by a man-eating lion and was not expected to live. I made a short march to the karia and halted for the noon camp close by. At the request of the relations of the sick man, while camp was being pitched, I walked over to the karia with my hunters, carrying a bucket full of carbolic lotion, a quart of carbolic oil, iodoform, lint and bandages, and a syringe. We came to a hut, outside which was a crowd of people; and looking in I saw, lying on the bare ground, the body of a man without any clothing on. He was smeared over the head and body with dust and blood, and had seven or eight deep fang wounds in the small of the back and low down in his left side near the bowel. All these wounds were uncared for, and on closer inspection I found them to be swarming with white maggots! I asked permission to have him carried outside the hut, where it was lighter; but his relations at first objected, saying in his hearing that he was sure to die, it would only give him unnecessary pain, and it was the will of Allah that he should die. The man, however, after some persuasion consented, and as gently as we could we lifted him from the floor of the hut, where he had been lying for the last thirty hours, and laid him on a camel-mat outside.

Having obtained permission to try my best with the medicines I had brought, I first got his wife to wash him all over, the other relations looking on at every movement of the white man with great interest; I don’t think they cared much about the sick man. When he had been washed he looked more cheerful, and turning him over I made a careful examination of the wounds. There were eight deep holes in the small of the back, dangerously near the spine, where the lion had taken him up and dropped him two or three times; and there were a couple of wounds deep in the left side, which had not, fortunately, penetrated the bowel. I told the man that there was no reason, with luck, why he should not recover, and he became quite cheerful, and gave me permission to probe the wounds. His uncle now appeared with a piece of stick having a shred of tobe twisted round it, and with this rough instrument we probed all the wounds, and I syringed them out carefully with carbolic lotion. The bystanders never ceased wondering at the performance of the glass syringe. The wounded man, like a true Somáli, never even murmured during this treatment. At last I was able to let him sit up, clean and almost smiling, all the holes in his body neatly plugged with pieces of lint soaked in carbolic oil; I gave his relations medicine for twenty days’ use, and a new tobe for bandaging, as well as a lecture on further treatment. They never ceased begging for the syringe, but I could not spare that, as we were going through lion country and might want it.

The story of the occurrence, which the natives then told me, was interesting. This man, with twenty other men and boys, had been asleep, two nights before, in a camel karia a few miles away. The camel karias are merely thorn fences round the camels, and there are no huts, the men sleeping on the inside of the fence in the open air. At about five in the morning, just before dawn, a lion sprang into the zeríba and seized this man, his companions making off, and the camels stampeding into the darkness. The man’s own account of what occurred then follows. He struck at the lion frantically with his hands, and the brute let him go, retiring to a little distance to watch him. The lion came on again, taking him up a second time and carrying him a few yards to the edge of the fence. Again the man struck out at the lion and he let go. A third time he took him up, and again the man, who was nearly exhausted, drove him off; and the lion, either frightened away by the dawn of day or impressed at the spirit shown by his victim, sneaked off. The man remembered no more till his friends returned some time afterwards, expecting to find only a few bones; and they carried him to the home karia and threw him into a hut to die, the thought of giving him food or washing the blood and dust from him not occurring to them; and there he had lain for thirty hours. To this day I have never heard whether or not he recovered, but having seen instances of wonderful recoveries among Somális, I am inclined to think he had a very good chance, that is, provided his relations used the carbolic lotion and did not steal the white tobe directly my back was turned.

On the evening of the same day I made another short march, and arrived at a place where a leopard had just killed a goat while the flocks were returning from pasture to a karia. We hastily constructed a shelter, and I sat two yards from one of my own goats, which I had tied up as a bait, with the wind blowing in my face, and the two hunters at my side with spare rifles. There was a faint moon, and at about nine o’clock a leopard charged the goat and killed it. I sat quietly till the hubbub had subsided, and then, as the leopard lay on the goat sucking its blood, with its back to me and its tail twitching close to my feet, I fired for the centre of its back, and it rolled over stone dead, with its four paws in the air, beside its victim. We raised a cheer, and all the men coming from camp, we carried it to the door of my tent and skinned it by the light of torches.

Next morning, as I had had good sport with the leopard, before marching I gave the women at the karias a large present of beads. Directly they knew that I had given the beads to Adan Yusuf to be distributed, they all rushed at him like tigresses, and in a fright he dropped the beads and fled. The women fought and wrangled till we had loaded and marched away. Several of the old men came to me and said that now I had given the beads the women would be quarrelling with each other for days, and would neglect the cattle, and require to be well beaten before things settled down again. As we marched off through the bush I shot a prowling hyæna.

On the 28th, while I was marching ahead of the caravan with the two hunters, I saw a herd of seven Waller’s gazelles and began stalking them. While we were still two hundred yards away, three leopards charged into the middle of the herd and killed a young doe before our eyes, scattering the others in every direction. We ran up to where the leopards were squatting over the carcase, in the middle of a broad open glade, but while we were still some distance away they saw us and all three made off at a canter. I think they were ordinary leopards, and not the long-legged, pale-skinned hunting leopard (the chítah of India). I fired at one of them and missed, and then we sat by the side of the dead Walleri till the caravan came up, hoping to see the brutes, but they never returned.

The following day we arrived at a deep well called Garbo. As we approached this well we saw vultures swooping towards two or three dead trees which overtopped the jungle, and searching about we found the bodies of a leopard and seven spotted hyænas, which had been poisoned during the night by a Midgán. He had drawn up water from the deep well and exposed it for the night in a shallow wooden bowl,[49] mixed with poison which he had concocted from various herbs. The success of his manœuvre was evident. The leopard had been half eaten by the hyænas, but I preserved the skull.

The natives whom we found encamped near here were very suspicious and surly, as they had had some disagreement with Prince Ruspoli’s caravan which had passed through before me. As we marched in the afternoon I left Hadji Adan with four men, and three camels loaded with water-casks, to follow us with a good supply of water. We had only gone a mile when we heard several shots fired in quick succession, and all running back to the wells, we found my men in sole possession. The natives had refused to allow them to take any water, and my men, instead of returning and complaining to me as they should have done, thinking to have a bit of fun, had fired a few shots over the heads of the crowd, sending them flying, with a worse impression of European caravans than they had before. I was naturally very angry and disgusted with Hadji Adan, who looked sheepish when I told him, in choice language, what I thought of him. On this march I fired three shots with my Lee-Metford rifle at a beautiful oryx bull which was galloping away. When he was already three hundred yards distant my third shot brought him down, and we camped by the body to take full advantage of the supply of meat.

Next day we made two hard marches to Daba-Jérissa, where I remained on 1st October, shooting a fine lesser koodoo buck. The people at Daba-Jérissa asked me to give judgment, in my capacity of Englishman, as to the amount of blood-money to be paid by another tribe for the murder of one of their number; but I said I would only arbitrate if both parties would appeal to me as a disinterested stranger, and that I could not undertake to act for the British Government, especially so far from Berbera.[50]

On 2nd October we made two long marches to the wells at Sassamani, where guinea-fowl swarmed in tens of thousands, blackening the river-bed as they came to drink in the evenings; and I had good sport here with the gun. On the way I attacked a herd of Sœmmering’s gazelles with the Lee-Metford, and dropped four bucks with six shots, at ranges between two hundred and fifty and three hundred yards. I gave most of the meat to some people whom we found at the wells, instead of a present of cloth which they asked me for.

On 5th October we arrived at the Gagáb wells at Milmil. Here I arranged a division of the caravan into two parts, sending one portion to Berbera by the shortest route, so that the men might be paid off and the camels sold; and I kept the other portion to accompany me in a leisurely journey to the coast by way of the Eidegalla Haud, where I hoped to get some lions. We left Milmil on the 6th of October and marched to a Rer Ali karia, and on the following day we made two marches to a large water-pan at Awáré. As no rain had fallen for months in this locality till quite recently, the pan was dry, but a deep well sunk through its bed contained plenty of water. The pan at Awáré is an isolated depression far out on the Haud Plateau, which contains rain-water for several weeks at a time. It is three marches to the north of Milmil, the last Ogádén watering-place on the southern edge of the Haud; and when the pan, or the well which the natives sink through its bed, contains water, the flocks and camels of the Rer Ali and Rer Harún are brought to Awáré to take advantage of the rich Haud pastures, which have better fattening qualities than those of Milmil. While passing through the Rer Ali grazing camels, of which there were many hundreds, on our way to the pan, we were all much amused by watching my hunter Geli, who was walking in front with my spare rifle over his shoulder. Before he joined me he had often, with the rest of his tribe, who were the Eidegalla, made looting excursions on horseback to this part of the Haud. As he walked on, looking at the fat humps of the camels to right and left, he wore an angelic smile on his face, and sang softly, “Hilib badan ai-y-ee ee” (Lots of meat, plenty of meat!) When he turned round and saw the whole caravan laughing at him he stopped and looked sheepish.

Geli was a capital fellow, and my men used to tell a story about him which he never contradicted. It appears that when only sixteen years old he was out looking after goats with his mother and sisters. A lion bolted off with one of the flock, and Geli, with the women, began idly to track him up, to see if he had gone far; because, if the lion was not far off, it might be worth while to call up the men from the karia to follow him. Geli went on ahead, and found the lion asleep under a bush, having eaten the goat. Geli decided to go and tell the tribe, but as he was turning away he thought he would just throw his spear, it looked so easy! He aimed at the lion’s ribs, hurled his spear, and then ran for his karia as hard as he could go; and coming back to look with twenty men on horseback, he found the lion dead.

The Haud in this locality is one mass of unbroken thorn forest, sometimes light and open, sometimes very dense, with high durr grass. Round the Awáré pan the forest is composed of very fine gudá thorn-trees, which grow for about fifteen feet without branches, and then shoot up and outwards in a fan-shape to a height of from thirty to forty feet The bark is black, and the foliage is made up of small star-shaped leaves, massed together and very green. It is the most picturesque tree in the Haud forest, and nothing can be prettier than the Awáré pan when the margin of open, flat meadow-land is covered with a carpet of fresh turf, and the trees are in foliage. On arriving at Awáré we pitched camp under a large gudá tree at the north-west corner of the pan, and I made my bed on the flat top of another on the eastern side, and tied up a donkey below. Lions roared in the forest a mile or two away, but did not come near the camp.

Next morning, without waiting for coffee, I got down from the tree and made straight for where we had heard the lions. About three miles from our tree we came on the fresh tracks of a large lion and lioness, and followed them. The bush was rather open, and the lioness must have been doing sentry and have seen us,[51] for we could hear her roaring in the jungle some distance ahead of us as she roused her mate; and running on in the direction of the noise, we were just in time to see a very large black-maned lion bound out of a thicket and make off, followed by a lioness. The grass was rather long, only showing their heads, and owing to intervening thorn-trees and the distance, I could not get a chance to shoot. We tracked these lions until a heavy shower of rain came on and lost us the tracks in the afternoon. I was hungry and suffering from a galled foot, and we were twice drenched with rain before we got home.

I lay at night on the top of the gudá tree near camp, but did not get a shot. A lion roared several times, early in the night, in the distance, but a shower of rain coming on before dawn, the people whom I sent out from camp failed to find his tracks.

On the 9th we moved the camp to a karia a few miles to the north-west, where lions were reported to be common. I sat all night in the top of a tree over a heifer tethered below, to no purpose. Next morning we came upon tracks of two lionesses and three cubs; but we only found them at 8 A.M., and the enormous flocks and herds of the Rer Ali had wandered about the jungle in every direction, and almost entirely obliterated the signs, so we gave it up; and we moved camp back to the former site at the Awáré pan. In the evening news of lions came from two opposite directions, south-west and north-east. I sent several horsemen out to verify the first, and I sent Hassan five miles to the south-east to the carcase of a camel which had been struck down by the lions, and ordered him to sit in a tree all night, and keep hyænas from the carcase by throwing stones at it. He had seen a lioness bound away as he came up to the spot at sunset, and sitting in a galól tree waiting for the brute’s return, he spent a most miserable night, for it rained heavily, and became so dark that a mob of hyænas dragged away the meat in spite of his stoning. In the morning, because of this rain, Hassan failed to find any tracks; so he returned to my camp, aching all over, for a rotten and twisted galól tree covered with large black ants is not a comfortable perch on a cold night. The horsemen whom I sent to the south-west reported the lion news to be a hoax of the karia people there, concocted in the hope of obtaining bakshísh.[52] During the day I received a visit from some Rer Ali headmen and minstrels, who serenaded me on foot while I was trying to get a little sleep at noon.

On the 12th I sent out horsemen to collect news of lions from the karias, and to make wide circles in the jungle in quest of tracks; they found those of a family of lionesses and part-grown lions, there being seven in all; so at night we tied up a donkey three miles from camp. I was prevented from sitting up over the bait by very heavy rain coming on towards evening, so I remained in camp. Next morning we found the donkey killed by lions and eaten. Coming up in the half light of early dawn, and stooping under the bushes, I saw several hyænas, and among them a lioness, stealing away. The range was nearly two hundred yards, but I fired and missed. I followed at best pace, and after twenty minutes’ tracking I saw her head for a moment looking over a tuft of grass, as she crouched thirty yards away, but she bounded off before I had time to look over the sight. I fired a shot after her into the grass, which must have missed. We again tied up a donkey in the same place, and sat up over it. But at about ten o’clock the dry galól, upon the flat top of which we had placed my bed, gave way, breaking off at the fork of the stem, and dropping us, with guns, water-bottles, and lantern, a distance of twelve feet, to the ground! It was very dark and a heavy thunder-storm was coming up, so we lit the lantern and trudged home through the bush. We left the donkey tied up, and coming next morning to take him away, we found he had been untouched by lions, and several cowardly hyænas had prowled round him all night afraid to tackle him; so that, except in his feelings, he was unhurt.

On the morning of the 14th, having heard a lion roar not far from camp at midnight, I sent out horsemen, and at 9 A.M. they reported tracks of two lionesses. Almost simultaneously came news that a goat had been killed by a lion at a karia about five miles away. The men said it must have been a large lion by the tracks and by the sound of his roar as he had bounded away, quite unlike the voice of a lioness. So I walked there with my two hunters, arriving soon after ten o’clock, and taking the owner of the goat as my guide, I made straight for the karia where the kill had occurred. The two horsemen who had brought the news followed me, leading their horses, in red and blue khaili tobes; but I dropped these men at the karia as being too conspicuous and likely to attract the lion’s attention.

We then followed the pugs of the lion from the zeríba, the parallel lines in the red soil showing where he had dragged his victim along. The trail was difficult to follow, as the ground had been overrun by sheep during the morning. At last we came to a very small boy in charge of a flock of sheep, and he told us there were no more domestic animals farther on, and that the lion had gone into a dark jungle of khansa and durr grass. We entered the jungle, and as we rounded a khansa thicket my hunter Liban said, “There he is!” and I saw his great shock head and shoulders come from out of a black overhanging khansa bush twenty-five yards away, which had been his lair, and in which we subsequently found the body of the goat. I had only time to see his huge head and mane come indistinctly through the foliage, when he bounded away to my left, across a space of two yards of open, into a patch of durr grass six feet high. I followed him with the sight of the rifle on his shoulder as he disappeared, and the trigger being rather heavy I did not actually get it off till he was well inside the grass. The rifle went off, and a loud roar followed as he galloped on, showing that he had been hit. The roar died away at once into a suppressed growl, then all was silence.

Now came the work of following him up. Making a circuit to the right we examined the expanse of grass and jungle into which he had sprung; it was very thick and extensive, stretching to the right and left for several hundred yards, so there was nothing for it but to follow him through it. We first fired a Snider at the place where we had last heard him, at the same time throwing sticks and shouting; and then, foot by foot, we took up his path, which was bathed in blood, straight through the high grass. From the very hurried nature of my shot I did not hope to have disabled him, although the rifle I had been shooting with was a heavy eight-bore Paradox. After going another half dozen yards, as we came to a mimósa, Liban said, “He is lying dead beyond that khansa bush.” Peeping through and seeing a mass of yellow, I saw that Liban was right. Skirting round, we found a noble, yellow-maned lion, the finest I had seen, in perfect condition and in the prime of life. My natives called my attention to the peculiar position in which he was lying, under the farther side of the mimósa. He had bounded away from his lair, getting my eight-bore bullet obliquely in behind the left lung, and out at the point of the right shoulder. He had roared and bounded on with this wound, and after going fifteen yards had taken the mimósa in one spring, falling dead in his tracks. We measured the bush over which he had sprung, and found it was eighteen feet broad and eight feet high, and absence of marks on the surrounding sand showed that he could not possibly have gone round. My theory is that the wound took full effect just as he made this supreme effort, landing him practically lifeless. The skin, when taken off, measured 10 feet 11 inches from nose to tip of tail when spread without stretching or pegging out. As I knelt looking at his head, surrounded by the men, women, and children who had flocked from the karias, I only wished for an European companion to help me admire him!

In the evening I made another platform in a gudá tree three miles to the south of camp. From my tent to about a mile south of it there was gravel. I found that lions, in passing camp to go to prospect some karias to the south-west of us, avoided the gravel, no doubt because it was uncomfortable for their feet, and invariably walked over the fine red clay a little farther to the south. Hence the choice of my new hiding-place. I spread my bed on the flat top of the tree, fourteen feet from the ground. It was like a spring mattress, gently waving before a cool breeze; and we slept beautifully most of the night, hung up in the air, with a brilliant canopy of stars above us and the mysterious sea of bush around us, with lions roaring frequently during the night. Next morning I was taken off on a “wild-goose chase” to a karia six miles distant to the north, where a lioness had taken a small goat in sight of the karia people; but the sheep and camels had since been driven over the tracks and we lost her, having to abandon, besides, the search for the tracks of the lion which had roared near my machán the night before.

I remained in camp on the 15th to let the skin of the large lion dry, and again slept in the machán three miles to the south of camp. The lions roared again; for there were a pair of them, the voice of the lioness being easily distinguishable from that of her mate. They never came to the donkey, and a heavy thunder-storm drenching us and our bedding, we lit a lantern and threaded our way to camp, leading the donkey, through the darkness. Sending out horsemen next morning, the tracks of the pair could not be found anywhere, so it was decided that their roars must either have been uttered from an immense distance, or that they must have been devils! But I think that, owing to the wet weather, their voices appeared to be very much nearer than they really were.

My leave now being at an end, we marched for Adadleh, over a waterless tract of Haud ninety miles in extent. We covered this distance in nine marches, or four and a half days, the whole of the country passed over having been one continuous sea of dense bush, dotted over with red ant-hills, some of the spires being twenty-five feet high. We arrived at Berbera on the 31st of October 1893, and I crossed to Aden next day on the way to England.

CHAPTER XI
NOTES ON THE WILD FAUNA OF SOMÁLILAND

The Lion (Felis leo)

Native name, Libah

Lion-shooting involves long halts of several days among the Somáli karias, with crowds of natives continually standing round camp, the dust from the countless camels and sheep filling the air and covering the bushes. Under these circumstances it may well be understood that other game is scarce, and that sitting unoccupied in camp waiting for news of a lion is not always interesting. Frequently the news which is brought in of lions having visited karias two or three miles away, taking a sheep or a heifer, or a young camel, as the case may be, is very unreliable. Yet the hunter must be ready to start on the instant, and after a tramp lasting from five to ten hours, he will return as often as not to his tent tired out, the victim of a silly hoax concocted for the purpose of wheedling bakshísh out of him.

Every few days one of these trips will probably end in a real find, and then grand excitement will be felt in creeping among the tunnels made by the dark khansa bushes, looking for the crouching enemy, which may spring up from any distance and from any direction; and there is an additional danger in three or four men being huddled together with rifles on full cock in such jungle.

As I have been nearly always travelling incessantly and generally on duty, I have seldom had time to wait among the Somáli karias for news of lions, and when I have been on leave, and time has permitted, I have generally preferred to camp among the mountains and look for large koodoo, amid fine scenery and away from the noise and dust of inhabited country. This, to my mind, is by far the most fascinating sport to be had in Somáliland. I have, however, had many shots at lions when marching, and have brought home the trophies of four. To make a good bag of lions, it is necessary to devote a trip exclusively to lion-shooting, but to my mind the bright moments of intense excitement do not come often enough to compensate for the long monotonous days in camp.

Lions are still numerous in Somáliland, chiefly in unexplored parts of the Haud and Ogádén. It is probable that many of the Haud lions never drink except when they can find pools of rain-water. They may be encountered at all times of the year at distances up to fifty miles or more from the nearest water. The Midgáns go after them a good deal, and bring their skins to Berbera and Aden for sale, but they are seldom good skins, very often being riddled with spear holes inflicted wantonly after death. When a lion has committed so many depredations among the karias that the men living in them are roused to the point of banding together to kill him, Somális and Midgáns, according to their own account, go after him on horseback till they bring him to a standstill in the open. Then they bait him by galloping round at full speed and shouting. The lion turns this way and that, trying to face them as they whirl round; and getting confused with the shouting and dust, he falls a prey to the arrows of the Midgáns, who mount and ride away to a safe distance with the other Somális, and wait for his death. Sometimes one of the horsemen is knocked over: an angry lion, unless too done up to make good his charge, being easily able to catch a bad or a tired pony.

The movements of the native encampments seem chiefly to influence the changes of quarters of the lions, the latter following the karias as they move to fresh pastures. When a family, with its flocks and herds and its karias, moves, its attendant lions, if there should be any, accompany it, being sometimes man-eaters and more often cattle-eaters. Last June my own caravan, while returning to the coast from Ogádén, was followed during two days, over a distance of forty miles, by a pair of hungry lions. We discovered this by chance, when some scouts of mine happened to go back along the road.

A few years ago there used to be plenty of lions in Guban, in the reeds bordering the Issutugan river, and about Kabri-Bahr, and along the foot of Gólis Range. Now the best country for them is decidedly the Haud Plateau and Ogádén, where there are still a good many. Milmil is sometimes a good place; also the base of Bur Dab Mountain, and the Waredad Plain, where there are patches of durr grass an acre or two in extent, with a few shady thorn-trees growing within them. They make their lair in the high grass under the shade of a tree, and as the grass patches are surrounded by bare red soil or sand, the pugs are easily found, and the brutes can be driven out into the open and shot. Lions living in the Haud, where it is elevated five thousand to six thousand feet, have better coats and manes than those found in Guban or in Ogádén, and the best skins I have seen have come from the elevated ban or open prairie. All the animals of the elevated country have thicker coats than those of the corresponding varieties found in the low country, this being necessary, no doubt, as a protection against the cold.

The Elephant (Elephas africanus)

Native name, Maródi

The Somáli elephant has within the last five years been much persecuted by sportsmen, and I am afraid that if this destruction goes on, in the near future there will be none left in Northern Somáliland, for they have entirely left their old haunts. In 1884, when Egypt evacuated Somáliland, elephants were plentiful on Wagar and Gólis, coming down to the southern edge of the Maritime mountains. Driven in December by the cold from the high interior, they wandered down the sand-rivers, feeding on the armo creepers and aloes.

Since Sir Richard Burton’s expedition thirty-nine years ago, few, if any, Europeans entered Somáliland until 1884, when two officers from Aden visited Gólis in search of elephants almost simultaneously with Mr. F. L. James’s expedition to the Webbe. From this time the disappearance of the elephant has been very rapid, and nearly all the herds have retired to the mountainous country in which the Tug Fáfan takes its rise; but a few herds still come down annually into the Gadabursi country. In 1884 elephants were shot at Dalaat and Digwein, places near Mandeira in the interior plain north of Gólis; and since that year I have never heard of them anywhere in this plain. In 1887 I had to ascend to Wagar before finding any, and since then they have retired from Wagar and Gólis altogether, and are never now by any chance, I believe, found east of Hargeisa, unless we except herds which wander eastward into the far interior of Ogádén from the western valleys of the Harar Highlands.

The cause of elephants having been driven away to such an extent is that sportsmen have not been satisfied with the death of a bull or two here and there, but have slaughtered large numbers of cows. In the first enthusiasm of elephant-shooting it is conceivable that a sportsman may shoot two or three cows as well as bulls, as I have done; but there is no reason, except the temptation afforded by very exciting sport, why large numbers of elephants of both sexes should be destroyed in Somáliland. They do no harm to the few plots of cultivation scattered at wide intervals, and very few Somális will eat their flesh. Though the elephants themselves are of the average size, this mountain ivory is probably as small as any to be found in Africa, sixty pounds being a very good pair of tusks, though greater weights have of course been recorded in exceptional cases.

I believe the question of the desirability of training and using the African elephants for transport is one which will become more important every year as Africa is opened up. Provided something could be done to stop the wholesale slaughter of elephants by English sportsmen, there is still a probability that the whole of our Somáli Protectorate would become restocked, for in the chaos of rugged gorges which descend abruptly from the Harar Highlands into Ogádén there are still plenty. I do not think that a moderate amount of elephant-shooting, properly regulated, does much harm, but the herds are certain to leave places where they have been hunted about without respite season after season, and where large numbers have been slaughtered.

In the Gólis Range there are many of the old elephant paths still existing, but the bones are very seldom found; and the Somális have a theory to account for this. In 1886 I went to Digwein, where an officer had shot a large bull elephant two years before, and I was shown the exact spot where it had been killed; and rummaging among the bushes we found the jaw-bones, with the heavy grinders still embedded in them. The Somális said this was all that was left of it, because the Esa Músa cattle and the koodoo antelopes had eaten all the soft parts of the bones.

The Black Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros bicornis)

Native name, Wiyil