"Get a ladder," suggested Means.
"No, we won't need a ladder," said the Colonel seriously, "but we'll have to throw him, after all. We can do it gently, I guess, without hurting him."
Accordingly, Means roped the giraffe by one hind leg and pulled it out from under him, so that he sank easily to the ground and both the ropes were loosened and freed.
The sun had set and the short twilight was rapidly deepening. The ox-wagons and porters were several miles ahead. So we packed up the camera, coiled up the ropes, mounted, and rode away, and the giraffe raised himself on his haunches among the bushes and watched us go.
We camped at a water hole that night, and started on again the next morning in the darkness before the dawn, with a porter ahead carrying a lantern to show the way. With ox-wagons it is a three days' journey from that water hole to the Guas Nyiro River at the border of the Sotik. The country through which we passed continued to be the same as that of the Mau escarpment—a succession of low hills and shallow valleys covered with the small, twisted trees. And there was plenty of water on the way. But there was no game in the district.
We had been told before starting that we need not expect to see anything on the way, because antelope, zebra, and such like animals avoid the wooded section so as not to be caught unaware by lions, and, since the prey seek the safety of the open plains, the lions are compelled to follow.
In spite of this fact, and although the dense woods and broken ground generally forced the safari to keep to the road, the cowboys were always ready and the cameras, always loaded with film. But the land on either side remained silent and deserted.
And each day's journey was the same as the one before; the start in the gray of the morning, the long, hot ride, with the road gently rising and falling over the hills, and the sudden cool of the evening when the sun went down. At times the camera department would take moving pictures of the wagons and porters crossing a river, where an especially picturesque bit of scenery offered an attractive setting. Occasionally Means, as he rode along, would commence singing one of the songs of our Western plains, verse after verse, seemingly without end, recounting in detail some local historical event, such as an Indian attack on an army post, a shooting affair at a dance, or a train-robber's hanging. He would sing more to himself than to anybody else, and if this began to bore him at all, he would stop in the middle and leave the story untold.
Then sometimes, when we outspanned for an hour at noon, the four special camera porters would give imitations of Kearton and Gobbet taking pictures, of Loveless shoeing horses, or of Means in the act of roping. And in the evenings, when the day's march was done and the outpost fires had been lighted, the talk of the company would turn to our chances of finding luck in the Sotik country that lay ahead.
In the afternoon of March 16 we reached Webb's Farm, in the Guas Nyiro valley, which lies at the edge of the big plains. In this neighborhood there were three farms—Webb's, Curry's, and Agate's—and on the evening of our arrival some of their men paid a visit to the camp. They had heard of the expedition, and each in turn examined the horses, the dogs, the ropes, and the saddles, and then, like the hunters at Nairobi, asked the inevitable question: