nds, and always threatened by
strange and savage animals. The life is new and the scenery new. There
is adventure and novelty in every day of such a life, and it is that
phase of it that has the most insistent appeal. It is the call of the
wild to which the pre-Adamite monkey in our nature responds.

Even if one never used his rifle one would still enjoy life on _safari_.
_Safari_ is an Arabic word meaning expedition as it is understood in
that country. If you go on any sort of a trip you are on _safari_. It
need not be a shooting trip.

Of course everybody who has read the magazines of the last year has been
more or less familiarized with African hunting. He has read of the
amount of game that the authors have killed and of the narrow escapes
that they have had.

He also has read about expeditions into districts with strange names,
but naturally these names have meant nothing to him. I know that I read
reams of African stuff about big game shooting and about _safari_, yet
in spite of all that, I remained in the dark as to many details of such
a life. I wanted to know what kind of money or trade stuff the hunter
carried; what sort of things he had to eat each day; what he wore, and
how he got from place to place. Most writers have a way of saying: "We
equipped our _safari_ in Nairobi and made seven marches to such and such
a place, where we ran into some excellent eland." All the important
small details are thus left out, and the reader remains in ignorance of
what the tent boy does, who skins the game that is killed, and what sort
of a cook stove they use.

The purpose of this chapter is to tell something about the little things
that happen on _safari_. First of all, at the risk of repeating what has
been written so often before, I will say a few words about the personnel
of a _safari_, such as the one I was with.

There were four white people in our expedition--Mr. and Mrs. Akeley, Mr.
Stephenson, and myself. Mr. Akeley's chief object was to get a group of
five elephants for the American Museum of Natural History and
incidentally secure photographic and moving picture records of animal
life. Both he and Mrs. Akeley had been in Africa before and knew the
country as thoroughly perhaps as any who has ever been there. Mr. Akeley
undoubtedly is the foremost taxidermist of the world, and his work is
famous wherever African animal life has been studied. Mr. Stephenson
went for the experience in African shooting, and I f