“Now,” I concluded, “I know just about what I can and what I cannot do.  Three days more of this sort of work will feed me up.  If we do not run across a sable in that time, I’m afraid we don’t get any.”

“Two days will do for me,” said he.

We called up the guide and questioned him closely.  He seemed quite confident; and asserted that in this country sable were found, when they were found at all, which was not often.  They must be discovered in the small grassy openings.  We began to understand why so very few people get sable.

We dismissed the guide, and sat quietly smoking in the warm soft evening.  The air was absolutely still save for various night insects and birds, and the weird calling of natives across the valleys.  Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the rumblings came to us.  So very distant was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening.  Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith, blotting out the stars.  The tall palms began to sway and rustle in the forerunning breeze.  Then with a swoop it was upon us, a tempest of fury.  We turned in; and all night long the heavy deluges of rain fell, roaring like surf on an unfriendly coast.

By morning this had fallen to a light, steady drizzle in which we started off quite happily.  In this climate one likes to get wet.  The ground was sodden and deep with muck.  Within a mile of camp we saw many fresh buffalo tracks.

This time we went downhill and still downhill through openings among batches of great forest trees.  The new leaves were just coming out in pinks and russets, so that the effect at a little distance was almost precisely that of our autumn foliage in its duller phases.  So familiar were made some of the low rounded knolls that for an instant we were respectively back in the hills of Surrey or Michigan, and told each other so.

Thus we moved slowly out from the dense cover to the grass openings.  Far over on another ridge F. called my attention to something jet-black and indeterminate.  In another country I should have named it as a charred log on an old pine burning, for that was precisely what it looked like.  We glanced at it casually through our glasses.  It was a sable buck lying down right out in the open.  He was black and sleek, and we could make out his sweeping scimitar horns.

Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast’s general direction.  Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage.  There we cautiously parted the grasses and looked.  The sable had disappeared.  The place where he had been lying was plainly to be identified, and there was no cover save a tiny bush between two and three feet high.  We were quite certain he had neither seen nor winded us.  Either he had risen and fled forward into the ravine up which we had made our stalk, or else he had entered the small thicket.  F. agreed to stay on watch where he was, while I slipped back and examined the earth to leeward of the thicket.