The quagga and the blaubok became extinct before the world learned that their existence was threatened!  The giant eland, the sable antelope, the greater kudu, the bontebok, blessbok, the mountain and Burchell zebras, all the giraffes save that of Nigeria, the big waterbucks, the nyala, the sitatunga, the bongo, and the gerenuk—­all will go in the same way, everywhere outside the game preserves.  The buffalo, zebra and rhinoceros are especially marked for destruction, as annoyances to colonists.  You who read of the killing of these species to-day will read of their total disappearance to-morrow.  So long as the hunting of them is permitted, their ultimate disappearance is fixed and certain.  It is not the way of rifle-shooting English colonists to permit herds of big game to run about merely to be looked at.

Naturally, the open plains of Africa, and the thin forests of the plateau regions, will be the first to lose their big game.  In the gloomy fastnesses of the great equatorial forests, and other really dense forests wherever found, the elephants, the Derby eland, the bongo, the okapi, the buffaloes (of three species), the bush-pigs, the bushbucks and the forest-loving antelopes generally will live, for possibly one hundred years,—­or until the natives secure plenty of modern firearms and ammunition.  Whenever and wherever savages become supplied with rifles, then it is time to measure each big-game animal for its coffin.

The elephants of the great equatorial forest westward of the lake region will survive long after the last eastern elephant has bitten the dust.  The pygmy elephant of the lower Congo region (Elephas pumilio) will be the last African elephant species to disappear—­because it inhabits dense miasmatic jungles, its tusks are of the smallest size, and it has the least commercial value.

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CHAPTER XIX

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE GAME OF ASIA

After a successful survival of man’s influence through two thousand years, at last the big game of India has made a good start on the road to vanishment.  Up to 1870 it had held its own with a tenacity that was astonishing.  In 1877, I found the Ganges—­Jumna dooab, the Animallai Hills, the Wynaad Forest and Ceylon literally teeming with herds of game.  The Animallais in particular were a hunter’s paradise.  In each day of hunting, large game of some kind was a certainty.  The Nilgiri Hills had been quite well shot out, but in view of the very small area and open, golf-links character of the whole top of that wonderful sky plateau, that was no cause for wonderment.

In those days no native shikaree owned and operated a gun,—­or at the most very, very few of them did.  If a rogue elephant, a man-eating tiger or a nasty leopard became a public nuisance, it was a case for a sahib to come and doctor it with a .577 double-barreled express rifle, worth $150 or more; and the sahibs had shooting galore.