too; from all sides they are coming
King Henry VIII
O, I have passed a miserable night,
So full of ugly sights, of ghostly dreams
King Richard III
One of our hunters, a melancholy visaged individual, was a very amusing personage to go out with alone. He always acted like the guide of a Cook’s personally conducted tour. Not a tree, or twig, or water-hole was left to be seen or not seen by us. All must be brought to the notice of the Mem-sahibs. It reduced the tracking of game to a delicious farce. If we sighted an antelope he would first point it out to me most carefully, telling me about the distance the creature was from us, perhaps saying commandingly, “You shoot um,” handing me my own rifle as though he were giving me a valuable present.
Sometimes he even went the length of putting it to my shoulder and cocking it for me, and was a grandmotherly hunter indeed! He spoiled a glorious chance for me one day with his chaperoning me through tactics, actually telling me the precise moment to fire, and when I did, at my own moment, and—through his rattling me so—missed ignominiously, he whispered to himself, with a whole world of resignation in his tone, “Mem-sahib no shoot, Mem-sahib no shoot!”
Mem-sahib turned round and gave the idiot a bit of her mind. I had had enough of being hurried and flurried by his ways. I learned early on to take no notice of my shikari. Clarence never made the egregious mistake of obtruding himself. Some of the others were not so cautious, and were very quick with their ideas and remarks. It is very easy to rattle a person after a tiring crawl, and throw the whole scheme out of gear to fall about your ears like an evanescent card-house. One asks time to recover breath and balance, taking one’s own way. Then on occasion it is necessary to shoot from all sorts of positions, and it is disconcerting to have any one commenting. I prefer to be able to sit down fair and square so that both knees may be elbow rests; but, alas, not often the opportunity is given in big game shooting to choose your position. You seize the moment, and the moment may find you placed very awkwardly.
We were now again in the most wonderful region for game that the heart of the most grasping sportsman could desire. Herds of buck were met with on every march we made, and galloping forms were outlined on every horizon. If there were more aoul to be seen in the early days of the discovery of Somaliland as a Land of Promise for the hunter, I do not know how the ground supported them. If the larger and more dangerous fauna has been thinned almost to extinction, it would seem that the lesser has thriven. Fewer lions to find food means more buck to live.
You never find aoul in jungle country, and consequently they are of gazelle the most easily seen. Frequenting the grass plateaus and flat sandy wastes, as they do, whereon a few straggling bushes try to grow, the white hindquarters stand out clear and distinct as a target. When going off, startled, they stretch out, seeming to gain many inches in length, and when wounded an aoul never creeps off to die in impenetrable bush where the hunter has a difficulty in locating the hiding creature. Sensibly he selects the open “bun,” and there is despatched the quicker.