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One day conversation with some of my people casually told them they had recently returned from no man's land, where he and some friends had been looking for Kumamma. The Kumamma were their neighbors to the west. They had been looking for them in order to spear them, should things be right – that meaning should the enemy be in sufficiently small force for them to easily overcome. When the numbers are all equal, both sides retire smartly to the rear. This is the normal kind of state in which these tribes live. It leads to a few deaths certainly, but it keeps the young men fit and out of other mischief. Every young man goes looking for blood frequently, and as they carry no food except a few handfuls of unground millet simply soaked in water, and as they never dare to sleep while in the neutral zone, it acts as a kind of field training. This youth, then, had seen no Kumamma but had seen elephant. My boys told me this and I tried to get the lad to go with us to hunt. He said he would come back and let me know. He did so and brought a friend. This friend was a most remarkable-looking man. Strange as it may seem, he had a most intellectual head. He was a man of perhaps 35 years of age, most beautifully made and tattooed for men victims only, I was relieved to see. a Bukora boy came to camp and while in e trekked hard for three days and came once more in sight of the Debasien range, but on its other side. On the night of the third day the rains burst upon us. The light calico bush tents were hastily erected in a perfect gale and downpour. Even Pyjale had to shelter. In the morning Pyjale said we were certain to see elephant if we could only cross a river which lay ahead of us. When we reached its bank, it was a raging torrent, red with mud and covered with patches of white froth. There was nothing for it but to camp and wait until the spate subsided. While this was being done, I saw a snake being carried down by the swollen river. Then I saw another and another. Evidently banks were being washed away somewhere. A boy pointed to my shorts and said that a doodoo (insect) had crawled up the inside of one of my legs. Thinking, perhaps, it was a fly, or not thinking at all, I slapped my leg hard with open hand and got a most frightful sting, while a huge scorpion dropped half crushed to the ground. But not before he had injected quite sufficient poison into me. W Pyjale was his name, and now began a firm and long friendship between this savage and myself. I cannot say that I have ever had the same feelings for any man as I came to have for Pyjale. He was, I found, a thorough man, courageous, quiet, modest, with a horror of humbug and untiring in our common pact, the pursuit of elephant. He was with me during the greater part of my time in Karamojo, and although surrounded by people who clothed themselves, never would he wear a rag even. Nor would he sleep comfortably as we did on grass on blankets. The bare hard ground by the campfire with a hole dug for his hip bone and his little wooden pillow had been good enough for him before and was good enough now. No one poked fun at Pyjale for his nakedness; he was the kind who did not get fun poked at them. Pyjale was game to show us elephants, but said we would have to travel far. His intelligence was at once apparent by his saying that we ought to take tents as the rains might come any day. He was right, for come they did while we were hunting. I took to Pyjale right at the start and asked him what I should do about the main safari. He said I could leave it where it was; no one would interfere with it. If I liked, I could leave the ivory in one of the villages. This I gathered was equivalent to putting one's silver in the bank at home. And so it is, bizarre as it may seem. You may leave anything with natives – ivory, beads, which are money, trade goods, stock, anything – and not one thing will they take, provided you place it in their care. But if you leave your own people to look after it, they will steal it, given the chance. Thinking that it might save trouble, I put all my trade goods in a village, and leaving the safari with plenty of rations, I left for a few days' hunting, taking a sufficient number of porters to bring home any ivory we were likely to get. This was necessary at this time as the natives did not yet follow me in hundreds wherever I went, as they did later on. "Insect, indeed," how I cursed that boy. And then by way of helping me, he said that when people were stung by these big black scorpions – like mine – they always died. He was in a frightful state. Then another fool boy said: "Yes, no one ever recovered from that kind." I shouted for whisky, for you certainly could feel the poison going through the circulation. I knew that what the boys said was bunkum, but still I drank a lot of whisky. My leg swelled and I could not sleep that night, but I was quite all right next day. The river had gone down somewhat, so I proposed to cross. No one was very eager to cross with a rope. A rope was necessary, as some of the boys could not swim and the current was running too strong for them to walk across the bottom under water, carrying stones to keep them down, as they usually did. I carried at that time a Mexican rawhide lariat and thought that this stretched across would do nicely for the boys to haul themselves over by. So I took one end to the other side and made it fast, and the safari began to come over. Once the plunge had been taken, I found that more of them could swim than they had led me to believe. Then the inevitable – when rawhide gets wet – happened and the rope parted. As luck would have it there was a boy about mid-stream at the instant. The slippery end slid through his fingers and he went rapidly downstream. His head kept going under and reappearing, but I thought that, as he had a smile on his face each time he came up, he was another humbug pretending to be unable to swim. His friends, who knew perfectly well that he could not swim a yard, said, of course, not a word. And it was not until he gushed water at the mouth instead of air that I realised he was drowning. I ran down the bank while another boy plunged in at the crossing place. I reached the boy first by a second and we SPOR TIN G CL ASSICS 64