The hippopotamus is found in the Shiré and Lake Nyasa, and indeed almost in any stream or lake where the water is deep enough to cover him. The rhinoceros is known, but not very common. There are many Cape buffaloes in the plains and marshes of the Shiré, and the solitary bulls, driven out of the herd on account of bad temper or other defects, are sometimes extremely savage. Such an animal, in 1894, charged out of the long grass on a party of carriers, near Chiromo, and knocked down, gored and trampled on, one man, who was rescued from him with difficulty. This man, a Tonga named Kajawa, when treated at Blantyre, was found to have seventeen wounds about him, but ultimately recovered.
Of other large animals, we have already mentioned the zebra; and the eland, though not very common, is also met with. There are several kinds of smaller antelopes, and, in the mountains, the beautiful little creature called the klipspringer, or, by the natives, the gwapi, which is something like a chamois.
Of monkeys, there are baboons, which go about in troops and plunder the growing crops, when they get a chance, and several smaller kinds.
The curious ant-eater called Manis or ‘Pangolin,’ and by the natives nkaka, is three or four feet long, shaped like a lizard and covered with lozenge-shaped brown scales, more like those on a fir-cone (the long, thin-scaled cones of the Norway spruce) than anything else I can think of. With his powerful claws he digs his way into the hills of the white ants on which he feeds, catching them on his sticky tongue, as he has no teeth wherewith to eat them. He is a slow-moving, nocturnal creature, and seldom seen, unless dug out of his burrow.
Another underground creature who ventures out by night is the porcupine, whose black and white quills are sometimes picked up in the bush and brought for sale by natives. It is fond of pumpkins and other vegetables, and often comes to feed on the crops at night.
Of beasts of prey we have the lion, the leopard, several smaller kinds of cats, the spotted hyena (disgusting in habits and contemptible in character, but interesting from his place in native folk-lore), jackals, and wild dogs (mimbulu), which hunt in packs like wolves.
Lions are common enough to be a plague. Thirteen years ago they were looked on as a thing of the past at Blantyre, though even then they were met with a few miles out on the Matope road, and I have heard, though not seen, them in the Upper Shiré district. (The roaring we heard two or three times, on stormy nights, came, we were assured, from the banks of the Kapeni, six miles away.) But the mysterious disease among the wild buffaloes, antelopes, and other game, which in 1894 spread westward to the lakes and then southward, and when it attacked the cattle in South Africa was known as rinderpest, deprived them of their food, and drove them to invade the more settled districts. Twelve were shot within a few weeks on one plantation, and a planter in the neighbourhood of Zomba, who was riding a bicycle, was chased for some miles by a lion, but ultimately escaped. In some parts, as, for instance, on the low ground near the Shiré, below the Murchison Cataracts, the natives build their huts on raised platforms so as to be safe from lions at night. Leopards also are apt to be dangerous; they prowl about habitations by night, usually in the hope of getting into the goat-kraal, or picking up some stray dog unlucky enough to have been left outside, and are by no means above carrying off the miserable fowls to be found in native villages, one of which can scarcely be a mouthful. But they frequently attack human beings; and at one village a leopard had made a habit of waiting in the grass beside a certain path along which the women went to fetch water from the river, and had killed several before he was shot. Wizards are supposed to take this shape, among others.
Hut, near Shiré River
Domestic animals are not numerous, but we shall come back to them in a later chapter.