♂ WATERBUCK (Cobus ellipsiprymnus).
Average length of horns on curve, 20 inches.
When the work was, however, fairly under way I took a few strolls into the plain. On one occasion, when out, attended only by my hunter, Ali Hirsi, we blundered within half a mile of a large party of raiding Habr Gerhajis horsemen from the hills, whom the police from Berbera were trying to catch. Not knowing anything about the locality of the band I fired at a bustard, with the result that the robbers bolted for the hills, thinking the police had come up with them.
Bulhár was now getting full of people, the clans coming down into the plain. Two of these clans had a feud in active operation, and a large tree near Elmas Mountain was about this time the scene of a ghastly murder. Eight men and as many women and children of one of the clans were attacked when asleep under a tree by their enemies, and all had their throats cut. My hunter, Ali Hirsi, who belonged to the clan which had suffered, promptly asked leave to go to the interior and see his father, who, he said, had been suddenly taken ill. I afterwards found that this was incorrect, and that Ali Hirsi, being the son of an ákil, had found it incumbent on him to answer the family call to arms.
Shortly afterwards my friend the late Mr. D. Morrison, Mr. Walsh’s assistant, arrived from Berbera to take charge of Bulhár, and he at once found his hands full with this feud between the two clans of the Shirdone Yunis, Habr Awal, called respectively the Boho Shirdone and the Ba-Gadabursi Shirdone. British interests suffer sadly by these feuds occurring near our ports, as for the time being all trade is liable to be stopped.
A few days after M⸺’s arrival a messenger came running in at dawn one morning to say that the Boho had taken possession of the Bulhár wells, three miles west of the town, and were that morning going to be attacked by the Ba-Gadabursi from Elmas, each side being about five hundred strong. M⸺ at once decided to ride out with his interpreter and try to dissuade the Ba-Gadabursi from attacking. I accompanied him on one of the Sapper mules, taking with me Khoda Bux, a Panjábi muleteer, also mounted. After going three miles, at the Bulhár wells we came upon the Boho Shirdone halted, awaiting the attack. Here I found my hunter, Ali Hirsi, sporting a khaili tobe, with a good nag grazing close by. He came up cheerily to me, with nothing of the servant about him, and shook hands. I asked him after his sick father, and with a bland smile he said he had got well again, and was going to fight the Ba-Gadabursi.
We rode on, and crossed a bare, undulating plain, which in the evenings is sometimes covered with sand-grouse, and where I had often hunted aoul, and a mile beyond the Boho we came upon the Ba-Gadabursi, not halted, but already advancing in line to the attack!
