On the following day I took the half of the caravan which I had chosen for the koodoo-hunting trip, and marched three miles, from Mandeira wells to a small spring just under the crest of Gán Libah Mountain, which is six thousand feet above sea-level. The height of our camp here was four thousand five hundred feet. In the morning, while the men were moving camp to the new site, I took my two hunters Géli and Hassan, and an Esa Musa guide from some karias which we found at Mandeira, and searched the hills for koodoo, but only saw some female koodoo and young ones, so we made for camp, which we found pitched in a very pretty little glade on the hillside. I had no tent, but a small hut made of camel-mats, covered over with waterproof sheets, and fastened to some poles which we cut from the thorn bushes. To the east, just below camp, was a rocky torrent-bed, with stretches of flat sand in the bottom, and a small stream trickling through it, forming waterfalls of a foot or two in height, and flowing northwards into the Tug Mandeira. All the country for a mile or two round was very much broken and cut up by ravines from Gán Libah and other high mountains overlooking the camp; and in these ravines were long strips of the gudá jungle, with thick aloe undergrowth four feet high.
Three miles north-west, on the right bank of the Tug Mandeira sand-river, rises a very curious pinnacle or boss of hard rock, called Dagaha Todobálla, or the “Rock of the Seven Robbers” (from todoba, seven). The story goes that seven Jibril Abokr robbers came from the west on one of their periodical raids, to search for plunder among the Esa Musa flocks grazing at the foot of the Gólis Range; but the Esa Musa collected in force, and these men fled to the top of the almost inaccessible rock, where they were surrounded and finally cut to pieces by the enraged tribesmen. Rising as it does to a height of about a hundred feet above a sea of jungle of the large gudá thorn-trees, it forms a very beautiful addition to Mandeira scenery, which indeed is all very striking. There are several of these rocks and hillocks in the Mandeira Valley, and the large thorn jungles round their bases are the home of that lovely antelope, the lesser koodoo, which combines many of the beauties of both the large koodoo and the African striped bushbuck, and is midway between them in size. There are also wart-hog, Waller’s gazelles, the tiny Sakáro, as well as guinea-fowl and large koodoo in the mountains close by.
On the evening of 5th June I went out again with the same men, holding south-west along the lower slopes of a ridge called Gol Adéryu, or the “Hill of Koodoos”; and here I bagged a splendid specimen of a koodoo bull. When Géli first saw him we were moving along the base of the hills, crossing several torrent-beds, all more or less hidden under gudá trees, with bare gravelly ridges, or ridges covered with grass and aloe jungle, forming the watersheds. He was about three hundred yards away in front of us, standing nibbling the young shoots of the gudá where a thick mass of this kind of jungle crowned a ridge. The ground where the koodoo had taken up his position was higher than the low open ridge on which we had been standing when we saw him; but the wind was blowing in our faces, and was therefore in our favour. Two small torrent-beds intervened between us and the game. His body was quite concealed by the dark green foliage, only the head and shining horns being occasionally visible as he stretched himself out to reach down a branch, and it was long before I could make out what Géli was pointing at. But looking through my field-glass I saw that I had to deal with the bearer of a splendid pair of horns, the best I had seen, the whitish tips looking a yard apart, and the evening sun being reflected from the wide spirals.
We sank flat to the ground together where we had stood, and lay, without daring to move, fearing that some unlucky chance should cause him to come out of the bush and look towards us. We spoke in whispers, taking many more precautions than were really necessary at this distance because of the great size of this particular old bull, and the intense fear I had of losing him. We lay upon a flat, open piece of gravel about ten yards square; and so nervous did we become that we dared not creep along the ground from our respective positions far enough to tear down a branch to hold before the face, preferring to lie motionless in the open, in full view, to the chance of a movement catching his eye.
We lay for probably twenty minutes watching him, and we had perfected all the arrangements for a most difficult stalk, when, with an abrupt movement, he turned his head towards the north, only the tips of his horns appearing above the foliage. But they were motionless, and I knew that he had seen or heard something. I turned my head round slowly to look at my companions, to see whether they had moved, but they lay as they had dropped, and no sound above a whisper had been uttered by any of us.
Suddenly the pair of horns swung round to the south, and the bull’s shoulders appeared in full view as he gave a great bound forward, disappeared among the bushes, and emerged galloping his hardest up the ridge, where the jungle was thin, his tail held erect; next second he had plunged into a watercourse and disappeared, and a few minutes later we saw his whole body in the far distance as he made his way heavily up the steep Gol Adéryu ridge and went down on the other side. We looked blankly at each other! Of course it was of no use concealing ourselves now, so we got up and walked to the spot where the koodoo had been standing; and here, to our disgust, we met three men and two women of the Esa Musa, who had come from the Mandeira karias to pick gum. They had been walking along a torrent-bed and had come close up to the koodoo before they saw him; and one of the Esa Musa had thrown his small spear at him and missed, sending the koodoo off as we had seen.
We enlisted these people in our service by a promise of meat if successful, and then we slowly took up the tracks. But we soon lost them again in the rocky ground, and extending into a line and moving over the ridge where he had disappeared, we resolved ourselves into couples and searched independently for further tracks.
We must have spent over an hour doing this, and traversed about a mile of very steep, stony hills covered with dense thorn bush, with occasional deep canons and gullies in the limestone, when one of the gum-pickers ran up and motioned to me to follow him; and scrambling over another half mile of steep ground we came upon the tracks of a koodoo, which by their size I concluded to be those of the bull we had lately lost. He had slowed down into a walk, the tracks leading up to a very high ridge, and we took them over the top with great caution, hoping that we might come upon him somewhere in the next valley.
We were soon scrambling along the sides of the valley when Hassan pointed downwards, and I saw the koodoo rounding a spur a hundred and fifty yards away, and about a hundred feet below us; and throwing up the rifle I fired just before he disappeared, the bullet telling loudly, and my men calling out that he was hit. We got down to where he had been in a few seconds, and rounding the corner we found him lying in a bush which had stopped his body as it had rolled down the hill. The .577 bullet, entering behind the withers, had driven nearly through him, breaking the spine and killing him almost instantaneously. All the Somális, of course, began shaking hands with me across the body to show their delight. This was a splendid old bull, his massive neck being covered with scars received in fights with his species, scratches from the thorn bushes through which he had forced his way, and abrasions from the rocks where he had fallen. The horns measured 34½ inches between tips, 37 inches in a straight line from base to tip, and 49 inches round the spiral.