About an hour afterwards I heard a loud whinny from the mule, and looking out of the tent I saw her swimming out in the middle of the stream, her head bobbing up and down in the water. She was being carried down fast, so I fired a gun into the air to wake the men, and we all jumped up and ran to the edge of the water. There was a perpendicular scarp just below the site of the camp, where the swift current had undermined the bank, and towards this she was being carried. We ran to the beginning of the steep place, and two of the men, plunging into the river, caught her head as she came on with the current, and bringing her to the bank, after a hard struggle, with all hands helping, we landed her high and dry. Examining the bank, we found several long streaks in the mud showing where the mule, while drinking, had slid in; and then we went to look for Adan’s horse, and a search up and down the river only disclosed similar marks in the mud farther down stream; we never saw the horse again, and no doubt the crocodiles got him. Indeed, hobbled as she was, it was wonderful how the mule kept above water and it was lucky she had the sense to whinny, and so attract attention to her accident.
The Gilimiss guide whom we had taken from Karanleh told me that we should be attacked by the Aulihán if we followed the river down as far as Burka, and represented the Aulihán to be very dangerous people. But I found, upon questioning my own men, that the guide had lately been concerned in the killing of an Aulihán, and that tribe naturally wanted his blood; so, to avoid trouble, I dismissed him and went on without a guide. This was not difficult, because a good native path followed the course of the river, and we were never so far from the bends that we could not bring from them, in our casks, the water for camp use.
On 5th September we arrived at a low precipitous hill called Burka, shooting a bull oryx on the way. We met some of the Aulihán who were watering their flocks, and on 6th September we followed them to their karias, which were some distance inland. The name of this sub-tribe was Rer Afgab, Aulihán. They gave us milk and a display on horseback; and they asked us to go to their country to shoot, stating they would barter cattle in exchange for cloth, and that if I took the cattle afterwards to the Gállas in the Wéb country I would get plenty of ivory.
On 7th September, finding that the giraffe ground was at least four days to the south of Burka, we marched back towards Karanleh, to be ready to meet Dubbi Harré on the day appointed. We made a long march to our old camp at Ellán, where I had lost the horse, and thence we went to Yahia’s village. Dubbi Harré had not yet arrived, so we retraced our steps down the river to shoot for a few days, halting at a place called Shendil. Our camp was pitched on open ground outside a belt of forest some four miles long by one mile deep, fringing the Webbe. On the northern bank, opposite to Shendil, was Sen Morettu, where we had first struck the river a fortnight before. To the south of us lay an even plain gradually rising towards the Gálla mountains, being covered in alternate patches of thick thorn bush and glades of long, coarse, buffalo grass.
The operation of pitching camp was interrupted by a row between two of my men, one of whom had two fingers broken by the descending butt of a Snider rifle, which had been intended for his head. Having held an inquiry, and disarmed and placed the culprits under supervision at opposite ends of the camp, to let them cool down, I went out into the thick bush to the south and had some exciting shooting, getting two very fine waterbuck.
On the 12th I went out shooting on a wide open plain which had been cleared by fire, only the leafless trees with charred stems being left standing above the black ground; young grass, always very attractive to game, had begun to spring up, and here I shot two more waterbuck, both carrying good heads. In the evening, going into the high forest by the river to look for the dól, or bushbuck, to our astonishment we came to some very large bovine tracks, which my guide, a Gilimiss, at once pronounced to be those of wild buffalo. There were two old bulls. We followed them in and out among the glades and thick cover near the margin of the river, and found the marks where they had lain and rolled in the mud during the previous night; but it became dark before we could come up with them. My guide, a Midgán, said that four bull buffaloes had strayed from the Gálla country a few years before, and that his father had shot two of them with poisoned arrows, those which we were hunting being the two survivors; and I am inclined to think these two were perhaps the only specimens on the Webbe, for I had always been told that buffalo did not exist anywhere near Somáliland.
I made a very strong zeríba while we were halted here; for the Aulihán at Burka told me that the Gállas were constantly raiding down to the river, and that while on the southern side we were liable to attack, owing to the strong antipathy to white men which had sprung up in Gállaland. We were reminded of the insecurity of the border by passing the skeletons of two Gállas, who a month before had been promptly killed by the Aulihán “because they looked like robbers.” Their unburied bodies had been cleaned by vultures, and left to lie in the long grass by the side of the path; and whenever, attended by my two hunters, I went out to shoot on the burnt ground west of camp, we passed them; and the grinning skulls made us involuntarily feel along our cartridge belts to see that they were not empty. This condition of insecurity is very uncomfortable, and it is also a great nuisance when one is out shooting, as when hunting dól in the thick bush one cannot hope for success if attended by more than two men, because of the difficulty in moving silently; and three riflemen, miles from camp in thick bush, would make a poor defence against a strong raiding party of Gállas.
I devoted one day to a buffalo hunt, which was more exciting than successful. In the early morning we went into the forest again and came on the fresh tracks of the two buffalo, in the densest bush near the river bank, the whole jungle being composed of evergreens and a network of creepers. It was necessary to stoop and sometimes to crawl on all fours through the tunnels of vegetation; sometimes five or six creepers clinging around arms and legs held me fast, so that it would have been impossible to shoot; I had to go bareheaded because of the tangled vines which constantly swept off my canvas hat; but this did not matter, because the density of the forest afforded protection from the sun’s rays,—indeed there was perpetual twilight inside. Underfoot were the débris of all kinds of timber, almost impossible to climb over without making some noise. The whole jungle smelt of monkeys. They could be seen overhead covering the branches in clusters, their chattering giving notice of our approach as we stole along. There were two kinds: the large dog-faced baboon, different from those found in the mountains of Somáliland chiefly in the absence of the full gray mane; and a small tree monkey, whose scientific name I am ignorant of.
After creeping about noiselessly for the space of two hours with Géli and Hassan, I put up the buffalo at a distance of about twenty yards, but we could only hear the heavy pounding of the earth and cracking of sticks as they galloped off, with continuous crashing through the undergrowth, and the hollow sound of the larger limbs of the trees breaking as they charged ahead. We followed, in the course of the morning putting them up no less than seven times. Once we came to their lair, at a spot in the densest line of thicket close to the river, where four large banyan-trees grew together, their roots and descending branches interlacing to form a labyrinth of caves with upright pillars. The place was nearly dark; it smelt of buffalo and was full of their droppings; one of the exits was a tunnel through the thicket about five feet high. Through this they had escaped, and finding they could not pass under a branch six inches thick, which spread horizontally across this opening at a height of four feet, they had charged it full tilt and broken it short off. Following the buffalo, we put them up again, but they broke back towards the eastern part of the jungle, the original end from which we had first driven them. I had been after them for three hours, and though we had heard their rush close to us many times we had never obtained a glimpse of them. They were dodging about in the thickest parts of the forest and would not face us among the glades.
