[Sidenote: _AFRICAN WILD BOAR._] So we moved our traps a few miles off and built our camp; this was hardly done when a storm burst upon us, and the rain poured down by bucketsful, and the thunder and the lightning was something terrific. It was a good thing that our shades were right, for we should have been wet to the skin. Early the next morning I shouldered my rifle and set off for the wildest part of the wood with friends Malaouen and Querlaouen, who now felt quite happy since we had left the abandoned village. The woods were pretty hard to go through, for the hunting-paths had not been used often, for fear of the Bakalai living in the Ashankolo. In this gigantic forest there is a most extraordinary kind of wild boar, its body being of a bright red-yellow color, somewhat like that of an orange. How strange they look as they wander through the forest, sometimes a few together, at other times twenty or thirty, or even larger numbers! That morning we got into new and fresh tracks of the wild boars; the earth was all uprooted by their snouts. I am sure they had not come to the place a half-hour before we did, and what a havoc they had made! We followed the tracks in hot haste; soon we could hear their grunts, and we thought they must be numerous by the noise they made. How to approach them was the difficult question; for if there is any wild game, this is certainly one of the wildest sort I know. If there had been two or three of them together we might not have had so much difficulty in approaching them; but how were we to approach so many without being detected? So we concluded to go by a roundabout way and try to get ahead of them, and then lay in ambush, waiting for them to pass. The wild boars were in a valley, where the ground was somewhat soft, and they would, I thought, continue to follow it. In the midst of this valley there was a beautiful little rivulet of clear water meandering crookedly on in the same uneven manner as the narrow valley itself, which was flanked on each side by tremendous high hills, covered like the valley and all the country round with gigantic trees, which bore different kinds of fruits and nuts. Then we concluded to ascend a hill close by and descend in as swift a manner as we could into the valley on the other side, which was the same one in which we were standing: by doing so, we could make a short cut and get ahead of the wild boars, and then choose our ground and wait for them. The plan succeeded perfectly. After crossing, we found a huge dead tree fallen on the ground, and behind it we hid ourselves. Soon we heard the grunts of the wild boars coming; we were delighted; we looked at our guns, then fixed the barrels on the trunk of the tree, raised our heads hardly above it, and only so high that our eyes could get a glimpse at the wild boars. [Sidenote: _A PIECE OF STRATEGY._]