unable to ride, be was too proud to say nay, and was
therefore placed upon it, carrying the gun consigned
to bis charge, Captain Burton’s smooth elephant.
Now Bombay rode much after the fashion of a sailor,
trusting more to balance and good-luck than «kill
in sticking o n ; and the consequence was, that with
the first side-step the donkey made he came to
the ground an awkward cropper, falling heavily on
the small of the stock of the gun, which snapped short
off, the piece being thus irredeemably damaged. At
first I rated him heartily, for this was the second of
Captain Burton’s guns which had been damaged in my
hands. I then told Bombay of the circumstances which
led to the accident to the first gun. I t occurred whilst
hippopotamus-shooting on the coast rivers opposite to
Zanzibar; and as Bombay had a little experience in
that way to relate, we had long yarns about such sport,
which served to improve our Hindustani (the language
I always conversed with him in), as well as to divert
our useless yet unavoidable feelings of regret at the
accident, and also killed time.
One day, when on the Tanga river near its mouth,
I was busily engaged teasing hippopotami, with one
man, a polesman, in a very small canoe, just capable
of carrying what it had on board, myself in the bows,
with my 4-bore Blissett in hand, while Captain Burton’s
monster elephant-gun, a double-barrelled 6-bore,
weighing, I believe, 20 lb., was lying at the stern in
the poler’s charge.
The river was a tidal one, of no great breadth, and
the margin was covered by a thick growth of the
mangrove shrub, on the boughs of which the sharp-
edged shells of the tree-oyster stuck in strings and
clusters in great numbers. The best time to catch the
hippopotamus is when the tide is out and the banks
are bared, for then you find him wallowing in the
mud or basking on the sand (when there is any),
like jungle-hog, and with a well-directed shot on the
ear, or anywhere about the brain-pan, you have a good
chance of securing him. I especially mention this, as
it is quite labour in vain, in places where the water is
deep, to fire at these animals, unless you can kill them
outright, as they dive under like a water-rat, and are
never seen more if they are only wounded. I, like
most raw hands at this particular kind of sport, began
m a very different way from what, I think, a more
experienced hunter would have done, by chasing them
m the water, and firing at their heads whenever they
appeared above it j and even fired slugs about their
eyes and ears, m hopes that I might irritate them sufficiently
to make them charge the canoe. This teasing
proved pretty successful; for when the tide had
run clean out, only pools and reaches, connecting by
shallow runnels the volume of the natural stream, remained
for the hippopotami to sport about i n ; and
my manoeuvring in these confined places became so
irritating, that a large female came rapidly under
water to the stem of the canoe, and gave it such a
sudden and violent cant with her head or withers, that
that end of the vessel shot up in the air, and sent me
Y