Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/149

 I went over to the bush where the wounded animal had gone down near me, and stood for a moment looking at him open-mouthed and wondering what he was. Never had I heard of such an antelope. He had sharp straight horns four inches long and was a beautiful French gray in colour. Before I could observe anything else, he sprang to his feet and darted away on three legs faster, it seemed to me, than anything I had ever seen travel. I shot several times but never touched him. I followed for hours but did not overtake him. Later I learned that he was one of the little beira antelope. The species had been described some time before from fragments of skin obtained from natives. As far as records show, these specimens, an adult female and a half-grown one, were the first specimens taken by a white man.

This is a good example of a mistake that a hunter may easily make where there is nothing about of known size to give scale. The outline of the beira, characterized by the large ears, is almost a miniature of that of the koodoo. These tiny antelope had stood against a background of acacias on a pebbly slope. Acacias grow both large and small and a pebble among pebbles on a distant hillside may appear as a large boulder.

I continued hunting the little devils in a desperate effort to get a male at least. Several times I spent the day working about the two cone-shaped hills, now and then catching glimpses of the beira, only to have them disappear before I could shoot or get near enough to shoot. Several times when leaving the