This and the next two photographs probably constitute the most remarkable series of animal photographs ever seen. No 1 shows a hippopotamus about to be trapped, preparatory to having its teeth attended to.
When a hippopotamus is killed in the water, the carcase sinks to the bottom, and in the cold water of the rivers of Mashonaland will not rise to the surface till six hours after death. In the warmer water of the Lower Zambesi a dead hippopotamus will come up in about half that time. When it rises, the carcase comes up like a submerged cork, with a rush as it were, and then settles down, only a small piece of the side showing above the surface. As decomposition sets in, it becomes more and more swollen, and shows higher and higher above the water. When the body of a dead hippopotamus has been taken by the wind or current to the wrong side of a river, I have often climbed on to it and paddled it with a stout stick right across the river to a spot nearer camp. A dead hippopotamus is not the easiest or the pleasantest thing to sit on in deep water with crocodiles about, especially in a wind, as it is very much like sitting on a floating barrel, and unless the balance is exactly maintained one is bound to roll off.
DENTAL OPERATIONS ON A HIPPOPOTAMUS—NO. II.
This shows the process of filing one of the lower tusks.
DENTAL OPERATIONS ON A HIPPOPOTAMUS—NO. III.
Sawing off one of the lower tusks.
Although it is often necessary for an African traveller to shoot one or more of them in order to obtain a supply of meat for his native followers, there is not much sport attached to the killing of these animals. The modern small-bore rifles, with their low trajectory and great penetration, render their destruction very easy when they are encountered in small lakes or narrow rivers, though in larger sheets of water, where they must be approached and shot from rickety canoes, it is by no means a simple matter to kill hippopotamuses, especially after they have grown shy and wary through persecution. As these animals are almost invariably killed by Europeans in the daytime, and are therefore encountered in the water, they are usually shot through the brain as they raise their heads above the surface to breathe. By the natives hippopotamuses are killed in various ways. They are sometimes attacked first with harpoons, to which long lines are attached, with a float at the end to mark the position of the wounded animal, and then followed up in canoes and finally speared to death. Sometimes they are caught in huge pitfalls, or killed by the fall of a spear-head fixed in a heavy block of wood, which is released from its position when a line, attached to the weight and then pegged across a hippopotamus's path a few inches above the ground, is suddenly pulled by the feet of one of these animals striking against it. A friend of mine once had a horse killed under him by a similar trap set for buffaloes. His horse's feet struck the line attached to the heavily weighted spear-head, and down it came, just missing his head and entering his horse's back close behind the saddle. Where the natives have guns—mostly old muzzle-loading weapons of large bore—they often shoot hippopotamuses at close quarters when they are feeding at night. The most destructive native method, however, of killing these monsters with which I am acquainted is one which used to be practised by the natives of Northern Mashonaland—namely, fencing in a herd of these animals and starving them to death. As there is a very rapid fall in the country through which all the rivers run to the Zambesi from the northern slope of Mashonaland, these streams consist of a series of deep, still pools (called "sea-cow holes" by the old hunters), from a hundred yards to more than a mile in length, connected with one another by shallow, swift-flowing water, often running in several small streams over the bed of the river. A herd of hippopotamuses having been found resting for the day in one of the smaller pools, all the natives in the district, men, women, and children, would collect and build strong fences across the shallows at each end. At night large fires would be kept blazing all round the pool and tom-toms beaten incessantly, in order to prevent the imprisoned animals from escaping. Day after day the fences would be strengthened, and platforms sometimes built to command naturally weak places, and from these points of vantage the poor animals were speared when in their desperation they tried to leave the pool. Gradually the whole herd would be speared or starved to death.
