missed him, but the roar of the shot so surprised him that he

came to a stand. Memba Sasa passed me the Springfield, and I
managed to get him in the head. At the shot another flashed into

view, high up in the top of a tree. Again I aimed and fired. The
beast let go and fell like a plummet. "Good shot," said I to

myself. Fifty feet down the colobus seized a limb and went
skipping away through the branches as lively as ever. In a moment

he stopped to look back, and by good luck I landed him through
the body. When we retrieved him we found that the first shot had

not hit him at all!
At the time I thought he must have been frightened into falling;

but many subsequent experiences showed me that this sheer
let-go-all-holds drop is characteristic of the colobus and his

mode of progression. He rarely, as far as my observation goes,
leaps out and across as do the ordinary monkeys, but prefers to

progress by a series of slanting ascents followed by
breath-taking straight drops to lower levels. When closely

pressed from beneath, he will go as high as he can, and will then
conceal himself in the thick leaves.

B. and I procured our desired number of colobus by taking
advantage of this habit-as soon as we had learned it. Shooting

the beasts with our rifles we soon found to be not only very
difficult, but also destructive of the skins. On the other hand,

a man could not, save by sheer good fortune, rely on stalking
near enough to use a shotgun. Therefore we evolved a method

productive of the maximum noise, row, barked shins, thorn wounds,
tumbles, bruises-and colobus! It was very simple. We took about

twenty boys into the jungle with us, and as soon as we caught
sight of a colobus we chased him madly. That was all there was to

it.
And yet this method, simple apparently to the point of

imbecility, had considerable logic back of it after all; for
after a time somebody managed to get underneath that colobus when

he was at the top of a tree. Then the beast would hide.
Consider then a tumbling riotous mob careering through the jungle

as fast as the jungle would let it, slipping, stumbling, falling
flat, getting tangled hopelessly, disentangling with profane

remarks, falling behind and catching up again, everybody yelling
and shrieking. Ahead of us we caught glimpses of the sleek

bounding black and white creature, running up the long slanting
limbs, and dropping like a plummet into the lower branches of the

next tree. We white men never could keep up with the best of our
men at this sort of work, although in the open country I could

hold them well enough. We could see them dashing through the
thick cover at a great rate of speed far ahead of us. After an

interval came a great shout in chorus. By this we knew that the
quarry had been definitely brought to a stand. Arriving at the

spot we craned our heads backward, and proceeded to get a crick
in the neck trying to make out invisible colobus in the very tops

of the trees above us. For gaudily marked beasts the colobus were
extraordinarily difficult to see. This was in no sense owing to

any far-fetched application of protective colouration; but to the
remarkable skill the animals possessed in concealing themselves

behind apparently the scantiest and most inadequate cover.
Fortunately for us our boys' ability to see them was equally

remarkable. Indeed, the most difficult part of their task was to
point the game out to us. We squinted, and changed position, and

tried hard to follow directions eagerly proffered by a dozen of
the men. Finally one of us would, by the aid of six

power-glasses, make out, or guess at a small tuft of white or
black hair showing beyond the concealment of a bunch of leaves.

We would unlimber the shotgun and send a charge of BB into that
bunch. Then down would plump the game, to the huge and vociferous

delight of all the boys. Or, as occasionally happened, the shot
was followed merely by a shower of leaves and a chorus of

expostulations indicating that we had mistaken the place, and had
fired into empty air.

In this manner we gathered the twelve we required between us. At
noon we sat under the bank, with the tangled roots of trees above

us, and the smooth oily river slipping by. You may be sure we
always selected a spot protected by very shoal water, for the

crocodiles were numerous. I always shot these loathsome creatures
whenever I got a chance, whenever the sound of a shot would not

alarm more valuable game. Generally they were to be seen in
midstream, just the tip of their snouts above water, and

extraordinarily like anything but crocodiles. Often it took
several close scrutinies through the glass to determine the

brutes. This required rather nice shooting. More rarely we
managed to see them on the banks, or only half submerged. In this

position, too, they were all but undistinguishable as living
creatures. I think this is perhaps because of their complete

immobility. The creatures of the woods, standing quite still, are
difficult enough to see; but I have a notion that the eye,

unknown to itself, catches the sum total of little flexings of
the muscles, movements of the skin, winkings, even the play of

wind and light in the hair of the coat, all of which, while
impossible of analysis, together relieve the appearance of dead

inertia. The vitality of a creature like the crocodile, however,
seems to have withdrawn into the inner recesses of its being. It

lies like a log of wood, and for a log of wood it is mistaken.
Nevertheless the crocodile has stored in it somewhere a fearful

vitality. The swiftness of its movements when seizing prey is
most astonishing; a swirl of water, the sweep of a powerful tail,

and the unfortunatevictim has disappeared. For this reason it is
especially dangerous to approach the actual edge of any of the

great rivers, unless the water is so shallow that the crocodile
could not possibly approach under cover, as is its cheerful

habit. We had considerable difficulty in impressing this
elementary truth on our hill-bred totos until one day, hearing

wild shrieks from the direction of the river, I rushed down to
find the lot huddled together in the very middle of a sand spit

that-reached well out into the stream. Inquiry developed that
while paddling in the shallows they had been surprised by the

sudden appearance of an ugly snout and well drenched by the sweep
of an eager tail. The stroke fortunately missed. We stilled the

tumult, sat down quietly to wait, and at the end of ten minutes
had the satisfaction of abating that croc.

Generally we killed the brutes where we found them and allowed
them to drift away with the current. Occasionally however we

wanted a piece of hide, and then tried to retrieve them. One such
occasion showed very vividly the tenacity of life and the

primitive nervous systems of these great saurians.
I discovered the beast, head out of water, in a reasonable sized

pool below which were shallow rapids. My Springfield bullet hit
him fair, whereupon he stood square on his head and waved his tail

in the air, rolled over three or four times, thrashed the water,
and disappeared. After waiting a while we moved on downstream.

Returning four hours later I sneaked up quietly. There the
crocodile lay sunning himself on the sand bank. I supposed he

must be dead; but when I accidentally broke a twig, he
immediately commenced to slide off into the water. Thereupon I

stopped him with a bullet in the spine. The first shot had
smashed a hole in his head, just behind the eye, about the size

of an ordinary coffee cup. In spite of this wound, which would
have been instantly fatal to any warm-blooded animal, the

creature was so little affected that it actually reacted to a
slight noise made at some distance from where it lay. Of course

the wound would probably have been fatal in the long run.
The best spot to shoot at, indeed, is not the head but the spine

immediately back of the head.
These brutes are exceedingly powerful. They are capable of taking

down horses and cattle, with no particular effort. This I know
from my own observation. Mr. Fleischman, however, was privileged

to see the wonderful sight of the capture and destruction of a
full-grown rhinoceros by a crocodile. The photographs he took of