rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly coast.

By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which we
started off quite happily. In this climate one likes to get wet. The
ground was sodden and deep with muck. Within a mile of camp we saw many
fresh buffalo tracks.

This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings among
batches of great forest trees. The new leaves were just coming out in
pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost
precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases. So familiar
were made some of the low rounded knolls that for an instant we were
respectively back in the hills of Surrey or Michigan, and told each
other so.

Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass openings. Far
over on another ridge F. called my attention to something jet-black and
indeterminate. In another country I should have named it as a charred
log on an old pine burning, for that was precisely what it looked like.
We glanced at it casually through our glasses. It was a sable buck lying
down right out in the open. He was black and sleek, and we could make
out his sweeping scimitar horns.

Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I
crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the
cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's general direction.
Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and
moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage. There we
cautiously parted the grasses and looked. The sable had disappeared. The
place where he had been lying was plainly to be identified, and there