rnest effort to tusk Fundi, and the latter was jumping high in an
equally earnest effort to keep out of the way. Fortunately he proved
agile enough to do so until I planted another bullet in the aggressor.

These wart-hogs are most comical brutes from whatever angle one views
them. They have a patriarchal, self-satisfied, suburban manner of
complete importance. The old gentleman bosses his harem outrageously,
and each and every member of the tribe walks about with short steps and
a stuffy parvenu small-town self-sufficiency. One is quite certain that
it is only by accident that they have long tusks and live in Africa,
instead of rubber-plants and self-made business and a pug-dog within
commuters' distance of New York. But at the slightest alarm this swollen
and puffy importance breaks down completely. Away they scurry, their
tails held stiffly and straightly perpendicular, their short legs
scrabbling the small stones in a frantic effort to go faster than nature
had intended them to go. Nor do they cease their flight at a reasonable
distance, but keep on going over hill and dale, until they fairly vanish
in the blue. I used to like starting them off this way, just for the
sake of contrast, and also for the sake of the delicious but impossible
vision of seeing their human prototypes do likewise.

When a wart-hog is at home, he lives down a hole. Of course it has to
be a particularly large hole. He turns around and backs down it. No
more peculiar sight can be imagined than the sardonically toothsome
countenance of a wart-hog fading slowly in the dimness of a deep burrow,
a good deal like Alice's Cheshire Cat. Firing a revolver, preferably
with smoky black powder, just in front of the hole annoys the wart-hog
exceedingly. Out he comes full tilt, bent on damaging some one, and it
takes quick shooting to prevent his doing so.

Once, many hundreds of miles south of the Tana, and many months later,
we were riding quite peaceably through the country, when we were
startled by the sound of a deep and continuous roaring in a small brush
patch to our left. We advanced cautiously to a prospective lion, only
to discover that the roaring proceeded from the depths of a wart-hog
burrow. The reverberation of our footsteps on the hollow ground had
alarmed him. He was a very nervous wart-hog.

On another occasion, when returning to camp from a solitary walk, I saw
two wart-hogs before they saw me. I made no attempt to conceal myself,
but