We could do nothing with the gorilla, so the Ashiras took as much meat out of his body as they could conveniently carry. We cut his head off and carried it with us. It was a huge and horrible head. Looking at his enormous canine teeth, I saw at once that the monster must have had a tremendous fight a year or two before, for one of them had been broken off in the socket of the jaw. What a grand sight it must be to see a gorilla fight! This reminded me of the stories I had sometimes heard from the natives regarding the fearful conflicts the male gorillas have among themselves for the possession of a wife. Indeed, the fight that this one was engaged in must have been a severe one, for not only had one of his large teeth been broken, but one of his arms was shorter than the other, and had evidently been broken and united again, not, I am sure, by a surgeon-gorilla, for I do not believe they have any, but nature and time were the healing processes. There is a skeleton of a gorilla in the British Museum, the arm of which had been broken, no doubt, in some conflict, but when the animal was killed the wound had healed, and the bones of the arm had united. Minsho promised to tell us the story of a fight between two gorillas in the evening by the camp-fire. How tremendous that blow must have been, I thought, in order to break that powerful muscular and thick-set bony arm! The forest must have been filled with the loud yells of the monster as he fought desperately against his enemy. We continued our way after fording a stream about one hundred and twenty feet wide, called the Louvendji, carrying our gorilla's head with us, and toward dusk built our camp. After we had seated ourselves by the fireside, and I had taken my own modest meal, Minsho got up, after filling himself with gorilla meat, and said, "Moguizi, I promised you, after you had killed this big gorilla this morning, that I would tell you a gorilla story. Are you ready to hear it?" "I am ready to hear it," I said, and all the party shouted "All are ready to hear it." "Long ago," said he, "before I was born, and in the time of my father--for the story I am going to tell you is from my father--there was a terrible gorilla fight in the woods. My father had been cutting down trees in the forest in order to make a plantation, and was returning home, when suddenly he heard, not far from him, the yells of gorillas, and he knew that the beasts were coming quickly toward him. "Not far from where he stood there was a large hollow tree, into which he at once entered and hid himself, for he was afraid of the gorillas. He had with him only his axe, and of course could not dream of fighting the gorillas, especially as there were two of them. He had hardly entered his hiding-place before the gorillas made their appearance. My father trembled with fear lest they should discover where he was, but they were so enraged at each other that they did not busy themselves about what surrounded them."