But, as we drew
near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
we fired the body drifted on in peace.
On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.
So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
the river's bank previously untouched by man, where there was a
stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
from the base to the point.
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