Immediately opposite the sound of the guns the bush was so thick I could not get through with the horse; so, tying him to a tree on the outside, I crawled in, and came upon a kind of backwater from the main river, very deep, 150 yards long by fifty wide, with high banks, especially the one opposite me, on which sat the dear old laird blazing away right merrily--his after-rider helping him keep up the cannonade by loading one of the guns. ‘What is it?’ I shouted. ‘Look at those beasts,’ he replied--_bang_. ‘There again’--_bang_. ‘Look!’ he cried. The pool was alive with monstrous heads, and though this was the first time I had seen the hippopotamus in the flesh--fat, perhaps, I ought to say--for we had then no friendly hippo in the Zoo--there was no mistaking him. I opened fire at once from my side at heads which showed for a second above water and then disappeared below, again to reappear; and Murray kept pounding away from his. This went on for a quarter of an hour, and nothing came of it; though the hippos were hit every time, not one of them seemed to die--there was, apparently, the same amount of snorting, puffing, and blowing--but no results of the thirty or forty shots that had been fired, and yet the animals were within twenty or twenty-five yards of us. ‘Have you killed any, old fellow?’ I shouted, and the answer came back to me, ‘No!’ At the same moment a big bull made straight for the part of the bank on which I was standing. Letting him get his forelegs clear of the water, I fired within three feet of his head, blowing him back, as it seemed, into the stream. ‘Well, I’ll swear I hit him!’I roared to Murray. ‘Oh, I’ve hit all I’ve fired at,’ was his reply. The evening was closing in, and just before we started for the waggons one hippopotamus floated up dead on Murray’s side. We looked at one another, and did not say much of our shooting. Next morning, however, on the surface of the creek lay fourteen huge bodies--a hippopotamus sinks to the bottom when killed, and only floats when the gas distends the stomach; at least, that was our reading of the riddle. It is the poorest of sport, and I never shot another except for food. The young are very good eating, the flesh resembling the most delicate pork. We knew nothing about the tusks when we shot this first batch, and so lost some valuable ivory. Large hippopotamus’ teeth were then worth 20_s._ a lb., when elephant ivory would bring only 5_s._ 6_d._, the former, I believe, being used for the finest sort of inlaying and artificial teeth.[4]