trees and
dotted with rhinos.

[Drawing: _A Morning Walk on the Tana River_]

When I went to Africa I was equipped with the following fund of
knowledge concerning the rhinoceros: First, that he is familiarly called
"rhino" by the daring hunters who have written about him; second, that
he is a member of the Perissodactyl family, whose sole representatives
are the horse, the rhino, and the tapir; third, that he savagely charges
human beings who write books about their thrilling adventures in Africa,
and, finally, that he looks like a hang-over from the pterodactyl age.
The books and magazine stories that have come out since Mr. Roosevelt
made African hunting the vogue invariably describe the rhino as being
one of the most dangerous of African animals. A charging rhino, a
wounded lion, a cape buffalo, and a frenzied elephant are the four
terrors of the African hunters. All other forms of danger are slight
compared with these, and I was full to the guards with a vast and
fearful respect for the rhino. I fancied myself spinning around like a
pinwheel with the horn of a rhino as a pivot, and the thought had little
to commend itself to a lover of longevity--such as myself, for instance.

[Photograph: A Comfortable Hammock of Zebra Skin]

[Photograph: Mrs. Akeley and Her Tana River Monkey]

After going to Africa and meeting some of the best members of the rhino
set I was able to form some conclusions of my own, chief of which is the
belief that he is dangerous only if he hits you. As long as you can keep
out of his reach you are in no great danger except from the thorns.

The prevailing estimate of the rhino is that he is an inoffensive
creature who likes to bask under the shade of a tree and watch the years
go parading by. His thick skin and fierce armament of horns seem to make
of him a relic of some long-forgotten age--the last survivor of the time
when mammoths and dinosauruses roamed the manless waste and time was
counted in geological terms instead of days and minutes. His eyes are
dimmed and he sees nothing beyond a few yards away, but his hearing and
sense of smell are keen, and he sniffs danger from afar in case danger
happens to be to windward of him. His sensitive nose is always alert for
foreign and, therefore, suspicious odors, and when he smells the blood
of an Englishman, or even an American, his tail goes up in anger, he
sniffs and snorts and races around in a circle while he locates the
direction where t