te fur shining
against the sun. I wanted him very much, and promptly let drive at him
with the 405 Winchester. I always carried this heavier weapon in the
dense jungle. Of course I missed him, but the roar of the shot so
surprised him that he came to a stand. Memba Sasa passed me the
Springfield, and I managed to get him in the head. At the shot another
flashed into view, high up in the top of a tree. Again I aimed and
fired. The beast let go and fell like a plummet. "Good shot," said I to
myself. Fifty feet down the colobus seized a limb and went skipping away
through the branches as lively as ever. In a moment he stopped to look
back, and by good luck I landed him through the body. When we retrieved
him we found that the first shot had not hit him at all!

At the time I thought he must have been frightened into falling; but
many subsequent experiences showed me that this sheer let-go-all-holds
drop is characteristic of the colobus and his mode of progression. He
rarely, as far as my observation goes, leaps out and across as do
the ordinary monkeys, but prefers to progress by a series of slanting
ascents followed by breath-taking straight drops to lower levels. When
closely pressed from beneath, he will go as high as he can, and will
then conceal himself in the thick leaves.

B. and I procured our desired number of colobus by taking advantage of
this habit-as soon as we had learned it. Shooting the beasts with our
rifles we soon found to be not only very difficult, but also destructive
of the skins. On the other hand, a man could not, save by sheer good
fortune, rely on stalking near enough to use a shotgun. Therefore we
evolved a method productive of the maximum noise, row, barked shins,
thorn wounds, tumbles, bruises-and colobus! It was very simple. We took
about twenty boys into the jungle with us, and as soon as we caught
sight of a colobus we chased him madly. That was all there was to it.

And yet this method, simple apparently to the point of imbecility,
had considerable logic back of it after all; for after a time somebody
managed to get underneath that colobus when he was at the top of a tree.
Then the beast would hide.

Consider then a tumbling riotous mob careering through the jungle as
fast as the jungle would let it, slipping, stumbling, falling flat,
getting tangled hopelessly, disentangling with profane remarks, falling
behind and catching up again, everybody yelling and shrieking. Ahead of
us we cau