“As the report of the rifle sounded, he plunged madly forward and was instantly lost to sight in the thick scrub. But I felt sure he carried death with him, and so it proved, for we found him lying dead not twenty yards from where he had stood when the bullet struck him. The fatal missile had passed right through his shoulders, and, having expanded on impact, had torn his heart to pieces. I had the dead ewe brought to where the ram had fallen, and laid them side by side; and then stood admiring them for a long time before I could bring myself to skin them. To thus secure a very fine pair of Inyala Antelopes—whose excellently-mounted skins are now safe in the Mammalian Gallery of the new Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road—on the very first day I had hunted for them, and after a little more than an hour’s search, was indeed a most glorious and exceptional piece of good fortune; which, however, has been balanced by many and many a day that I can remember of unrequited labour in search of game.
“As soon as I had stripped the skins, with the leg-bones still attached, from my two beautiful specimens, I had them carried, together with the skulls, to Gugawi’s kraal on the edge of the bush, and there spent the remainder of the day in preparing them for mounting. Of the meat, which was all brought in, I sent a couple of haunches over to Mr. Wissels, and then, after keeping a small piece for myself, gave the remainder to Gugawi to divide amongst his people as he thought fit.
“Next morning I was up and out in the bush just as day was breaking, accompanied only by my guide of yesterday and Longman, who, however, kept some distance behind, in order to allow my guide and myself to approach our game as noiselessly as possible. We had been creeping about in the dense jungle for some three hours without having seen anything, although there was a good deal of fresh spoor about, and twice we had heard Inyalas dash away through the bush without getting a sight of them, when suddenly my guide crouched to the ground, at the same time pointing towards a large ant-heap growing out of the dense scrub, and itself covered with undergrowth. Following the direction of his arm, I made out a reddish patch not fifteen yards away in the gloom of the bush; and taking it for an Inyala ewe, I fired into it point blank, as I required another specimen for mounting. At the shot the animal fell, and, on creeping up to it, I found that it was a young ram. It was something less in size than a full-grown female, from which it did not differ in any way in coloration, and the number and distribution of white stripes and spots. It was thus interesting, as showing that the Inyala changes in general colour from red to grey, only losing the rufous and orange tints on the ears and forehead, which were still conspicuous in the type-specimen described by Mr. Angas, when fully adult.
“On returning to the kraal, Gugawi proposed to take me to a spot some few miles higher up the Usutu, where he said there were plenty of Inyalas, whilst at the same time the bush was not so dense as near his kraal. Being by this time thoroughly sick of crawling about bent nearly double, I hailed with delight the idea of finding the game I was seeking in a country where I could walk upright, and visions of Inyala feeding through open glades passed through my mind; visions, alas! which were never realized, for in my small experience I never found these Antelope anywhere except in dense bush. However, I was glad of the change, and soon had everything ready for a move.
“In the afternoon we travelled some five or six miles up the river, and pitched camp in a bit of jungle near the water’s edge. The Usutu River is here very broad, and reminded me strongly of parts of the Chobi; but whereas the banks of the latter river, as I knew it in the early seventies, abounded in game of many descriptions, from the elephant downwards, there was not a track to be seen along the Usutu of any kind of animal with the exception of the Inyala. All the wealth of wild life which Baldwin saw in this same district forty years ago has melted away before the guns of the native Amatonga hunters; for, be it noted, this is a country in which but very little game has been killed by white men. Rhinoceroses, buffaloes, koodoos, waterbucks, impalas, lions, all are gone—the only game left being the Inyalas, which owe their preservation to the dense jungles in which they live; and even they are being rapidly killed off, as the natives are always after them, lying in wait for them in the paths made by the hippopotami, or creeping stealthily through the bush in their pursuit.
“It would be but tedious reading were I to continue to describe in detail my further bush-crawling experiences in search of Inyalas. Suffice it to say that on Oct. 1 and 2 I secured two more good rams, and preserved their heads for my own Collection. Although I should have liked to get a fourth ram for the South-African Museum, I did not think it prudent to remain any longer in my camp on the edge of a swamp, where I knew the air must be reeking with malarial poison, as, besides the exhalations from the marsh, the ground (from which I was only separated at nights by a little dry grass and a blanket) had been soaked to the depth of 2 feet by the recent rain, thus rendering the conditions more than usually unhealthy. The weather, too, was now again looking very threatening, and I did not relish the idea of any further lying out in the rain; as I knew, from former experience, that I should probably have to pay for the wettings I had already suffered by some attacks of fever—a disease from which I had been entirely exempt for seven years, but the poison of which I knew was still in my blood, and would be likely to be again stirred into activity by my recent exposure to unhealthy conditions.
“Hence, on Saturday, Oct. 3, I packed up my things and returned to Gugawi’s kraal, walking on in the afternoon to Mr. Wissels’s store, and thence to Lourenço Marques, Delagoa Bay, which I reached on October 7th, after a hot and weary tramp.”
Until lately the Inyala was believed to be restricted to the coast-lands of Eastern Africa south of the Zambesi. Recently, however, it has been discovered that this Antelope is likewise found further northward on the Upper Shiré, where it is known to the natives as the “Bō,” the o being pronounced very long. Mr. Alfred Sharpe, C.B., on his return to England at the end of 1891, first brought home a single flat skin of the so-called “Bō,” which was identified by Sclater as belonging to the male of this species, and other specimens have since been obtained in the same district. Mr. Sharpe’s information was that it is found only in a piece of thick scrubby country bordering the Moanza River, which enters the Shiré on its right bank, near the Murchison Cataracts.
In 1895 a fine specimen of this Antelope was forwarded to the British Museum by Mr. Gerald Oliver, R.N., of H.M.S. ‘Herald,’ with the following information in an accompanying letter:—
“On the 5th of October, last year, I was shooting near a village called Mantana’s (lat. 16° 30´ S., long. 35° E.), about 7´ W. by S. of Chilomo, near the right bank of the Shiré River. Impala (Æpyceros melampus) are very plentiful about this particular spot, but I had not been able to get a shot at a good head. Later in the day, wanting meat, I decided to kill what I could, and coming across a solitary doe I fired. Great was the astonishment of myself and boys to find I had killed a female Inyala. I took the skin to Chilomo, and was told it was the first Inyala ever known to have been killed about these parts, and that it was practically an unknown animal there.