After Much Shouting And Whistling, My Mounted
Man Arrived, And Making Him Dismount, I Rode My Little Horse Mouse, And
Returned To The Path.
My horse Filfil was lost.
As a rule, hunting
during the march should be avoided, and I had now paid dearly for the
indiscretion.
I reached the Atabbi river about eighteen miles from Obbo. This is a
fine perennial stream flowing from the Madi mountains towards the west,
forming an affluent of the Asua river. There was a good ford, with a
hard gravel and rocky bottom, over which the horse partly waded and
occasionally swam. There were fresh tracks of immense herds of elephants
with which the country abounded, and I heard them trumpeting in the
distance.
Ascending rising ground in perfectly open prairie on the opposite side
of Atabbi, I saw a dense herd of about two hundred elephants - they were
about a mile distant, and were moving slowly through the high grass.
Just as I was riding along the path watching the immense herd, a Tetel
(hartebeest) sprang from the grass in which he had been concealed, and
fortunately he galloped across a small open space, where the high grass
had been destroyed by the elephants. A quick shot from the little
Fletcher 24 rifle doubled him up; but, recovering himself almost
immediately, he was just disappearing when a shot from the left-hand
barrel broke his back, to the intense delight of my people. We
accordingly bivouacked for the night, and the fires were soon blazing
upon a dry plateau of granite rock about seventy feet square that I had
chosen for a resting-place.
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