We knelt down and prepared to receive cavalry, thinking that he was going to charge us; but his only thought was to rejoin his faithless friends, and the five monsters, now thoroughly frightened, fled into the mirage and we saw them no more. The mirage was very baffling; it was one of the difficulties of the hunter. In the first place, for some unexplained reason, it made all the beasts very wild, and in the second it made a field glass useless. This, however, did not affect the native hunters; like the Indian shikari they preferred to trust to their own eyes and were afraid to use a glass lest they should weaken their eagle sight. On the furthest divide that we reached we found an enormous herd; the prairie was black with them. Captain Vogel reckoned that there must have been over two thousand heads. Playing the same game I shot three fine bulls without difficulty or adventure. Two others, for which we could not stop, would be gathered next day. Vogel shot very badly, not killing a single beast, but he said himself that he did not pride himself so much on shooting as on getting up to game; of that craft he certainly was a master. I could not help thinking that his wonderful old three-barrelled shooting-iron had something to do with the missing. One old bull led us a fine dance, making us follow mile after mile without ever giving us a broadside chance. Further and further on we followed him until at last we had to give him up as a bad job, for we were between ten and twelve miles from camp and we had twisted and turned in so many windings that Vogel declared that he did not know where we were. A terror! We were parched with thirst and my feet were sore from walking in the hot dust. There were, of course, no landmarks, so we had to guess at our homeward route with the help of the sun and my pocket compass. A long, anxious tramp brought us to a divide where Vogel recognized some carcases which he had skinned the week before; close by he knew of a puddle of water at which he and the mare drank luxuriously; I could not! It was full of live insects and green vegetable matter, so I preferred to carry the leather which had once been my tongue into camp rather than run the risk of that poisonous draught. Four or five miles more brought us into camp where Tom Nickalls was blazing away with his rifle at a prairie chicken which was fool enough to stop until a lucky shot cut its head off. Oh! the joy of a drink of almost clean water out of Tom’s flask!