Before we started I remarked that I was offering two rupees for the
capture of a roan.

We had not gone ten minutes when Kongoni turned his head cautiously and
grinned back at us.

"My rupees," said he.

A fine buck roan stood motionless beneath a tree in the valley below us.
He was on the other side of the stream jungle, and nearly a mile away.
While we watched him, he lay down.

Our task now was to gain the shelter of the stream jungle below without
being seen, to slip along it until opposite the roan, and then to
penetrate the jungle near enough to get a shot. The first part of this
contract seemed to us the most difficult, for we were forced to descend
the face of the hill, like flies crawling down a blackboard, plain for
him to see.

We slid cautiously from bush to bush; we moved by imperceptible inches
across the numerous open spaces. About half-way down we were arrested by
a violent snort ahead. Fifteen or twenty zebras nooning in the brush
where no zebras were supposed to be, clattered down the hill like an
avalanche. We froze where we were. The beasts ran fifty yards, then
wheeled, and started back up the hill, trying to make us out. For twenty
minutes all parties to the transaction remained stock still, the zebras
staring, we hoping fervently they would decide to go down the valley and
not up it, the roan dozing under his distant tree.

By luck our hopes were fulfilled. The zebra turned downstream, walking