Next morning, in a joking manner, I tried to impress Kongoni with a sense of delinquency in not knowing better his directions, especially as he had twice traversed the route.  He declined to be impressed.

“It is not the business of man to walk at night,” he replied with dignity.

And when you stop to think of it, it certainly is not—­in Africa.

At this camp we lingered several days.  The great prize of our journeying was still lacking, and, to tell the truth, we had about given up hope, if not our efforts.  Almost we had begun to believe our friends in Nairobi who had scoffed at the uselessness of our quest.  Always we conscientiously looked over good kudu country, hundreds of miles of it, and always with the same lack of result, or even of encouragement.  Other game we saw in plenty, of a dozen different varieties, large and small; but our five weeks’ search had thus far yielded us only the sight of the same old, old sign, made many months before.  If you had stood with us atop one of the mountains, and with us had looked abroad on the countless leagues of rolling brush-clothed land, undulating away in all directions over a far horizon, you must with us have estimated as very slight the chances of happening on the exact pin point where the kudu at that moment happened to be feeding.  For the beast is shy, it inhabits the densest, closest mountain cover, it possesses the keen eyesight and sense of smell of the bush-dwelling deer and antelope, and more than the average sense of hearing.  There are very few of him.  But the chief discouragement is that arising from his roaming tendencies.  Other rare animals are apt to “use” about one locality, so that once the hunter finds tracks, new or old, his game is one of patient, skilful search.  The greater kudu, however, seems in this country at least to be a wanderer.  He is here to-day and gone to-morrow.  Systematic search seems as foolish as in the case of the proverbial needle in the haystack.  The only method is to sift constantly, and trust to luck.  One cannot catch fish with the fly in the book, but one has at least a chance if one keeps it on the water.

Mavrouki was the only one among us who had the living faith that comes from having seen the animal in the flesh.  That is a curious bit of hunter psychology.  When a man is out after a species new to him, it is only by the utmost stretch of the imagination that he is able to realize that such an animal can exist at all.  He cannot prefigure it, somehow.  He generally exaggerates to himself the difficulty of making it out, of approaching it, of getting his shot; until at last, if he happens to have hunted some time in vain, the beast becomes almost mythical and unbelievable.  Once he has seen the animal, whether he gets a shot or not, all this vanishes.  The strain on faith relaxes.  He knows what to look for, and what to expect; and even if he sees no other specimen for a month, he nevertheless goes about the business with a certain confidence.