It was too dark to see my sights plainly, but I shot at both of the jackals and sent them slinking away. I didn't go over to see if the little oribi was still alive, for I was certain that it had been killed. If it were dead I didn't want to see it and could not help either it or its mother; if it were alive its mother could get it safely away from the jackals. Since that moment I have hated jackals above all animals, not even excepting the odious hyena, and it is the chief regret of my hunting experience in East Africa that I did not kill those two cowardly vandals.
When the American reader picks up his paper and reads that Colonel Roosevelt has shot a Uganda cob, it is quite natural that he should not know what kind of a thing a cob is. If the colonel was out shooting "singing topis" or "singing sun hats," why, then, should he not also shoot corn cobs or cob pipes?
The cob, sometimes spelled kob, however, is only an antelope, although a graceful and handsome one. It is divided into several subspecies which live in different parts of the country. In one part will be found the large cob, almost the size of a waterbuck, which is called Mrs. Gray's cob, in honor of the wife of one of the former keepers in the London zoo; in another part is the species known as Vaughan's cob, and in still other parts are the dusky cob, the puku cob, the lechwi cob, the black lechwi, the Uganda cob and Buffon's cob.
It was Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson, the remarkable young English woman who is now dancing barefooted on the London music stage, who killed the record head of this last named species in Nigeria.
The Gregarious Cob
It is of the Uganda cob only that I am able to write about from my own observation and experience. We found them only in one place, on the banks of the Nzoia River near Mount Elgon and the Uganda border. They never were more than four or five hundred yards from the river and could not be driven away. If they were startled at one point they would circle around and quickly get back to the river at some other point. They seemed to become homesick unless they could see the river near by. We found them only in a short stretch of five or six miles, although they doubtless are found all the way down the Nzoia River to Victoria Nyanza.
The cob is a curiously reliable animal. He likes one certain place that he is accustomed to, and nothing can drive him away. If you see him there one afternoon, you are reasonably certain of coming back the next afternoon and seeing him there again. Usually they graze in some sheltered meadow along the river's edge, and for recreation, so far as I could see, amuse themselves by seeing how many can get on top of one ant-hill at one time. Some of those ant-hills were literally bristling with cobs, one male to each five females, and in herds of from thirty to fifty.
In architecture, the cob is nearly three feet high at the shoulder, has beautiful, sweeping horns of a lyrate shape, has a white patch around each eye, a white belly, and a coat of yellow with black on the forelegs. There is no handsomer antelope in Africa than the Uganda cob, and because it is found in such a restricted and remote district is accountable for the fact that one seldom sees a cob head in a collection of horns. Comparatively few sportsmen have killed them, although they are not hard to kill if one reaches a district where they are found. The extreme beauty of this antelope led us to secure a group of them for the Field Museum.
The reedbuck is another of the smaller antelopes that carries a beautiful head, and, like nearly all of the antelopes, comes in many varieties, or subspecies.