All stores and wines should be packed in boxes up to sixty-five pounds in weight. The boxes should be made with lock and key, and then screwed down with brass screws, and a careful invoice taken of the contents. To prevent the constant opening and re-opening of these boxes day after day, when any one particular thing is required, it is well to keep two or three for general use, stocked with such things as candles, tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, milk, Worcester sauce, &c., and a bottle of whisky. As the stores diminish, these boxes can be re-filled from the general stock at convenient times.
All trade goods for barter with the natives can be bought at Mombasa, the starting-point. It is now of little use to go down to Zanzibar, since porters (for transport) are not allowed to engage themselves for up-country work. Everything can be done at and from Mombasa, where not only can all trade goods be purchased, packed into the regulation 65 lb. loads, each load numbered, and an invoice taken of it, but all the latest information about the most suitable quality and quantity of goods required for the countries about to be visited can be better obtained at Mombasa than elsewhere.
To obtain the latest information with regard to the different kinds and qualities of cloth and beads is most important. Fashions change even in East Central Africa, and beads of a certain colour or cloth of a certain quality, which were perhaps in great demand one year, will not even be looked at the following year. Should the wrong kind of goods be taken up by mistake, the natives, although they might be willing to exchange their products for them, would only do so at such exorbitant prices that a trip would have to be curtailed, and all sorts of annoyances and disappointments incurred on account of the unlooked-for and ruinous expenditure of goods, unless others of the right kind were sent for from the coast, or could be procured from one of the stations near at hand.
CHAPTER VII
GAME DISTRICTS AND ROUTES
By F. J. Jackson
At particular seasons of the year there is a considerable migration of game beasts, and though all the lines of their migration are not ascertained, it is quite certain that great numbers work their way towards the coast between April and July; instinct in all probability impelling them in that direction, where the grass and all other vegetation are abundant. It would consequently be advisable for the sportsman to choose the time for his contemplated trip to a certain district when game is most likely to be plentiful there. Regard should also be had to a place suitable and convenient for headquarters, where surplus baggage, trophies, &c., can be stored, and where food for the caravan is procurable. The Kilimanjaro district, with Taveta as a depôt, was at one time, and perhaps is still, one of the best game districts in East Africa. Here game of nearly every variety is to be found, with the exception of Kobus defassus, Kobus Kob, Jackson’s hartebeest, sable antelope, Damalis Senegalensis, and the oribi. Elephants, though they are numerous in the wet weather, are confined almost entirely to German territory, at the base of the mountain below Mochi and Kiboso, and it would be necessary to get a permit to shoot them, either from the German Commissioner at Bagamoyo on the coast, or from the officer in charge of the district at Mochi. From about August to April the elephants are confined to the belts of dense forest on the mountain, at an elevation of from 7,000 to 10,000 feet, where it would be practically useless to attempt to follow them. About April they begin to leave this forest belt, and work their way down to the undulating country at the base of the mountain. This country is covered with bush, long grass (in places ten to twelve feet high), with plenty of mimosa and other trees scattered about, as well as with clumps of dense bush and large forest trees; and as it is well watered by numerous streams flowing from the mountain, which, lower down, form the Kikavo, Weri-weri, and other rivers, the elephants get plenty of food, and evidently find it altogether congenial to their habits, as very few of them wander into British territory. Within a few marches round Taveta the sportsman will come across every kind of country in which game is to be met with, from the bare, covertless, open plain, the haunt of the wildebeest, oryx, Grant’s gazelle, Thomson’s gazelle, &c., the ostrich, and the great bustard, besides the everlasting zebra and Coke’s hartebeest, to the dense and almost impenetrable forest in which is found the elephant and a small duyker-like buck (Cephalolophus Harveyi). The district is varied by open bush, where the stalker can see game when three or four hundred yards off; dense bush, where it is impossible to see anything until pretty close up to it; and sparsely timbered country, quite park-like in appearance.
A DIFFICULT STALK
Here every kind of stalking has to be practised. At one time the stalker must crawl painfully along, flat on his stomach, for long distances to get a shot at one of the wilder or scarcer antelopes; at another he must walk cautiously along in dense forest, with a thick covering of dead leaves on the ground, trying his utmost to tread lightly and noiselessly, and to avoid stepping on some fallen branch hidden away in the leaves, the snap of which would scare whatever he might be after, be it elephant or small duyker buck. In open bush—i.e. bush which is sufficiently open to enable the stalker to see the game when about a hundred yards off—stalking is generally easy work, as there are often plenty of ant-heaps, besides bushes, to be taken advantage of. In dense bush, stalking is often unsatisfactory and mere chance-work, as it is very difficult to avoid making a noise in getting through it, and disturbing the game before seeing it. Perhaps the prettiest, and often the easiest, stalking is done in park-like country, where there are both big trees, ant-heaps, and bushes dotted about, as well as grass some 18 inches high, to afford shelter to the stalker. In this district game is most abundant from September, when the young grass is just beginning to shoot after being burnt, to May, when it is long, coarse, and dry.