HUNTING OKAPI

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 September 1924, Page 2

HUNTING OKAPI

PIGMY’S DEADLY POISON.

Dr. Cuthbert Christy’s “Big Gaine and Pigmies” is a record of a naturalist’s quest of the okapi, rarest of antelopes, and other wild creatures in the Central African forests on behalf of the Belgian Government.

On a memorable occasion Dr. Christy had a right and left at elephant and okapi. He go;, the elephant, missed the okapi. The latter, he thinks is the

“most difficult of all beasts to catch even a sight of in its dim and far-off solitudes.” Probably no animal is so' shy, or so ghostlike in its movements through the forest. For the European to have any chance of success he must first secure the confidence of the little men to whom the forest belongs. Months have to be spent in practising forest craft with the little trackers.

From the elephant downward the pigmy slays all animals with his poisoned arrow. The shaft of the arrow is knocked out by the bushes, as the stricken animal flees through the forest. The arrow-head with its poison is left in the body, the heat of which soon melts the cocoa-butter and allows the poison to enter the blood-stream. They use stropanthus, an “exceedingly deadly heart poison.”

The extinction of the white rhinoceros as a wild species is “pretty certain in the near future.” He is “behind the times,” and shooting him is as “easy as hitting a haystack.” The white rhinoceros is no whiter in colour than the commoner (black) species, but has probably received its name from its habit of wallowing in mudholes, the mud of which is yellowish, red.

“It is no easy matter,” Dr. Christy says, “to bring oneself to shoot a chimpanzee in cold blood. Is is too distinctly like playing at murder.” At the first sign of' clanger the wary old male chimpanzee forsakes his family,, and, coming down from , the .tree-top with a few acrobatic swings and a drop, he makes off along the ground. He uses his great arms to help himself along, to push off from trees in his haste, or for swinging creepers and branches out of the way, rather than for running with. Under these conditions his attitude is distinctly human.

The Goliath Beetle of the Equatorial African forests is the “largest beetle in the world.”' Is has beautiful chocolate and white markings. Taking off from the branches of some tree, with as much commotion as a pigeon, the great beetle goes droning about in the hottest part of the day several hundred feet up in the air for all the world like an airplane, and making a very similar noise.

In the dim forest the “Papilio antimachus,” the “biggest butterfly in Africa,” is found, with its “wingspread of nine inches from tip to tip.” If made to rise suddenly, or if disturbed while sitting upon a branch, it will sometimes squirt water at the aggressor with considerable force as if with a syringe.