In just the same way the fierce wild life of parts of Africa to-day has nothing in common with what we now see in Europe and the Americas. Yet in its general aspect, and in many of its most striking details, it reproduces the life that once was, in Europe and in both the Americas, in what paleontologists call the Pleistocene age. By Pleistocene is meant that period—of incalculable length as we speak of historic time, but a mere moment if we speak of geologic time—which witnessed in Europe and Asia the slow change of the brute-like and but partly human predecessors of man into beings who were culturally on a level with the lower forms of the savages that still exist, and some of whom were physically, as far as we can see, abreast of the more advanced races of to-day.
Surely, this phase in the vast epic of life development on this planet offers a fascinating study. The history of man himself is by far the most absorbing of all histories, and it cannot be understood without some knowledge of his prehistory. Moreover, the history of the rest of the animal world also yields a drama of intense and vivid interest to all scholars gifted with imagination. The two histories—the prehistory of humanity and the history of the culminating phase of non-human mammalian life—were interwoven during the dim ages when man was slowly groping upward from the bestial to the half-divine.
It was my good fortune throughout one year of my life to roam, rifle in hand, over the empty, sunlit African wastes, and at night to camp by palm and thorn-tree on the banks of the African rivers. Day after day I watched the thronging herds of wild creatures and the sly, furtive human life of the wilderness. Often and often, as I so watched, my thoughts went back through measureless time to the ages when the western lands, where my people now dwell, and the northern lands of the eastern world, where their remote forefathers once dwelt, were filled with just such a wild life. In those days these far-back ancestors of ours led the same lives of suspicion and vigilant cunning among the beasts of the forest and plain that are now led by the wildest African savages. In that immemorial past the beasts conditioned the lives of men, as they conditioned the lives of one another; for the chief factors in man's existence were then the living things upon which he preyed and the fearsome creatures which sometimes made prey of him. Ages were to pass before his mastery grew to such a point that the fanged things he once had feared, and the hoofed things success in the chase of which had once meant to him life or death, became negligible factors in his existence.
Some of the naked or half skin-clad savages whom I met and with whom I hunted were still leading precisely the life of these ages-dead forebears of ours. More than once I spent days in heavy forests at the foot of equatorial mountains in company with small parties of 'Ndorobo hunters. They were men of the deep woods, as stealthy and wary as any of the woodland creatures. In each case they knew and trusted my companion—who was in one instance a settler, a famous lion hunter, and in the other a noted professional elephant hunter. Yet even so their trust did not extend to letting a stranger like himself see their women and children, who had retreated into some forest fastness from which we were kept aloof. The men wore each a small fur cape over the shoulders. Otherwise they were absolutely naked. Each carried a pouch, and a spear. The spear head was of iron, obtained from some of the settled tribes. Except this iron spear head, not one of their few belongings differed from what it doubtless was long prior to the age of metals. They carried bows, strung with zebra gut, and arrows of which the wooden tips were poisoned. In one place Kermit found where a party of them had dwelt in a cave, evidently for many weeks; there were bones and scraps of skin without and within; and inside were beds of grass, and fire-sticks, and a walled-off enclosure of branches in which their dogs had been penned. Elsewhere we came on one or two camping-places with rude brush shelters. Each little party consisted of a family, or perhaps temporarily of two or three families. They did not cultivate the earth; they owned a few dogs; and they lived on honey and game. They killed monkeys and hyraxes, occasionally forest hog and bongo—a beautifully striped forest antelope as big as a Jersey cow—and now and then elephant, rhino, and buffalo, and, on the open plains at the edge of the forest, zebra. The zebra was a favorite food; but they could only get at it when it left the open plains and came among the bushes or to drink at the river. Two of these wild hunters showed me the bones of an elephant they had killed in a pit a long time previously; and the head man of those we had with us on another trip bore the scars of frightful wounds inflicted by an angered buffalo. Hyenas at times haunted the neighborhood, and after nightfall might attempt to carry off a child or even a sleeping man. Very rarely the hunters killed a leopard, and sometimes a leopard pounced on one of them. The lion they feared greatly, but it did not enter the woods, and they were in danger from it only if they ventured on the plain. The head man above mentioned told us that once, when desperate with hunger, his little tribe, or family group, had found a buffalo killed by a lion, and had attacked and slain the lion, and then feasted on both it and the buffalo. But on another occasion a lion had turned the tables and killed two of their number. The father of one of my guides had been killed by baboons; he had attacked a young one with a club, and the old males tore him to pieces with their huge dog teeth. Death to the head of a family in encounter with an elephant or rhino might mean literal starvation to the weaker members. They were able to exist at all only because they had developed their senses and powers to a degree that placed them level with the creatures they dreaded or preyed upon. They climbed the huge trees almost as well as the big black-and-white monkey. I had with me gun-bearers from the hunting tribes of the plains, men accustomed to the chase, but brought up in villages where there was tillage and where goats and cattle were raised. These gun-bearers of mine were good trackers and at home in the ordinary wilderness. But compared to these true wild men of the forest they might almost as well have been town-bred. The 'Ndorobo trackers would take me straight to some particular tree or spot of ground, through miles of dense, steaming woodland every rood of which looked like every other, returning with unerring precision to a goal which my gun-bearers would have been as helpless to find again as I was myself; and they interpreted trails and signs and footprint-scrapes which we either hardly saw or else misread.
Doubtless the ancestors, or some of the ancestors, of these men had lived in the land, just as they themselves now did, for untold generations before the soil-tillers and cattle-owners came into it. They had shrunk from the advent of the latter, and as a rule were found only in isolated tracts which were useless for tillage or pasturage, the dense forest forming their habitual dwelling-place and retreat of safety. From the best hunting-grounds, those where the great game teemed, they had been driven; yet these hunting-grounds were often untenanted by human beings for much of the year, being visited only at certain seasons by the cattle-owning nomads.
Often these hunting-grounds offered sights of wonder and enchantment. Day after day I rode across them without seeing, from dawn to sundown, a human being save the faithful black followers, hawk-eyed and steel-thewed, who trudged behind me. Sometimes the plains were seas of wind-rippled grass. Sometimes they were dotted with clumps of low thorn-trees or broken by barren, boldly outlined hills. Our camp might be pitched by a muddy pool, with only stunted thorns near by; or on the edge of a shrunken river, under the dense shade of some great, brilliantly green fig-tree; or in a grove of huge, flat-topped acacias with yellow trunks and foliage like the most delicate lace; or where the long fronds of palms moved with a ceaseless, dry rustle in the evening breeze. At the drinking-holes, in pond or river, as the afternoon waned, or occasionally after nightfall when the moon was bright, I sometimes lay to see the game filing down to drink.
On these rides, I continually passed through, and while lying in ambush I often saw, a wealth of wild life, in numbers and variety such as the western world, and the cold-temperate regions of the Old World, have not seen for many, many thousands of years. How many kinds of beasts there were! Giraffes stared at us over the tops of the stunted thorn-trees. In the dawn we saw hyenas shambling homeward after their night's prowl. Wart-hogs as hideous as nightmares ploughed along with their fore knees on the ground as they rooted it up. Sleek oryx with horns like rapiers galloped off with even, gliding gait. Shaggy wildebeests curvetted and plunged with a ferocity both ludicrous and sinister; elands as heavy as prize cattle trotted away with shaking dewlaps. Ungainly hartebeests, and topi whose skins had the sheen of satin, ran with smooth speed. The lyre-horned waterbucks had the stately port of wapiti bulls. Rhinoceros, foolish, mighty, and uncouth, stood half asleep in the bright sunlight. Buffalo sought the shade of the thorn-trees, their bodies black and their great horn-bosses glinting white. Hippos snorted and gambolled in the water. Dominant always, wherever we saw them, were the lion and the elephant; and the favorite prey of the lion was the zebra, the striped wild horse of the African wastes.
Of course, these many different creatures were not all to be seen at any one time or in any one place. But again and again there were so many of them that we felt as if we were passing through a gigantic zoological garden. Often the line of our burden-bearing carriers had to be shifted from its point of march, to avoid a rhinoceros which stared at us with dull and truculent curiosity; while the zebra herds filed off with barking cries across the sunlit plain, and delicate gazelles, dainty as wood-sprites, fled like shadows, and hartebeests gazed toward us with long, homely faces; or we stopped to watch a herd of elephants, cows and calves, browsing among the thorns, their curling trunks raised now and then to test the wind, or perhaps one big ear lifted and then slapped back against the body.
One day at noon, in the Sotik country of East Africa, we stopped to skin a hyena which I had shot for the Smithsonian. As we skinned it the game of the neighborhood gathered to look on. The spectators included wildebeest, hartebeest, gazelle, topi, a zebra, and a rhinoceros—the hook-lipped kind. Late that afternoon I shot a lioness; the successive reports of the rifle and the grunting roars of the lioness, put to flight a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest which had hitherto been unconcernedly grazing not far off to one side of the scene of action.
On another day as I journeyed along the valley of the Guaso Nyero—first at the head of the safari, as it travelled through the green forest of the river-bed, and then with only my gun-bearers, through the hot, waterless, sun-scorched country back from the river—I saw rhino, giraffe, buffalo, eland, oryx, waterbuck, impalla, big gazelle, and gerenuk or giraffe-gazelle. After camping, toward evening, I walked up-stream, away from the tents, until I came to a spot where the river ran through a wild, rugged ravine. On the hither side I found the carcass—little more than the skeleton—of a zebra which had been killed by a couple of lions as it came to drink the previous night. It was evidently a favorite drinking-place, for broad game trails led down to the river at this point from both banks. As I sat and watched, a herd of zebra approached cautiously from the opposite side. There were in it representatives of two species of these gaudily marked wild horses or wild asses, the common zebra and the much, bigger northern zebra with longer ears and more numerous and narrower stripes. The herd advanced, avoiding cover as much as possible, continually halting, once wheeling and galloping back, ever seeking with eye and nostril some token of the presence of their maned and tawny foe. At last the leader walked down through a break in the bank to the river. The others crowded close behind, jostling one another as they sank their muzzles in the water. For a moment fear left them, and they satisfied their thirst, and those that were through first then stood while the rearmost drank greedily. But as soon as one of them began to move back to the shore the others became uneasy and followed, and the whole herd broke into a gallop and tore off for a couple of hundred yards. Looking at them it was easy enough to bring before one's eyes the tragedy of the preceding night; the herd nearing the water, wary, but not wary enough, the panic flight as the lion dashed among them, the struggling and the neighing screams of the victim before the great teeth found the life they sought. The herd I watched was not assailed; it cantered off; oryx and waterbuck came down to drink and also cantered off. The carcass of the murdered zebra, little but bones and shreds of red sinew and scraps of skin, lay not far from me. Footprints showed where the lions had drunk after eating. As the long afternoon lights waned, a hyena, abroad earlier than usual, began to call somewhere in the distance. The lonely gorge was rather an eerie place as darkness fell, and I strode toward camp, alone, keeping a sharp lookout round about; and as I walked and watched in a present that might be dangerous, my thoughts went back through the immeasurable ages to a past that was always dangerous; to the days when our hairy and lowbrowed forefathers, under northern skies, fingered their stone-headed axes as they lay among the rocks in just such a ravine as that I had quitted, and gazed with mingled greed and terror as the cave-lion struck down his prey and scattered the herds of wild horses for whose flesh they themselves hungered.