VI. THE FIRST GAME CAMP

In the review of "first" impressions with which we are concerned,
we must now skip a week or ten days to stop at what is known in
our diaries as the First Ford of the Guaso Nyero River.

These ten days were not uneventful. We had crossed the wide and
undulating plains, had paused at some tall beautiful falls
plunging several hundred feet into the mysteriousness of a dense
forest on which we looked down. There we had enjoyed some duck,
goose and snipe shooting; had made the acquaintance of a few of
the Masai, and had looked with awe on our first hippo tracks in
the mud beside a tiny ditchlike stream. Here and there were small
game herds. In the light of later experience we now realize that
these were nothing at all; but at the time the sight of
full-grown wild animals out in plain sight was quite wonderful.
At the close of the day's march we always wandered out with our
rifles to see what we could find. Everything was new to us, and
we had our men to feed. Our shooting gradually improved until we
had overcome the difficulties peculiar to this new country and
were doing as well as we could do anywhere.

Now, at the end of a hard day through scrub, over rolling bold
hills, and down a scrub brush slope, we had reached the banks of
the Guaso Nyero.

At this point, above the junction of its principal tributary
rivers, it was a stream about sixty or seventy feet wide, flowing
swift between high banks. A few trees marked its course, but
nothing like a jungle. The ford was in swift water just above a