06 African Adventure Read Online Free PDF Page A

can run on the level. When it kills an animal, it drags the body up a tree and puts it in the cleft of a high branch so that lions and hyenas can’t get at it. Many times game wardens have reported seeing a leopard shinny up a tree dragging a waterbuck or a zebra three times as heavy as itself. Sounds impossible, but they’ve proved it by shooting the leopard and weighing the carcasses. And a leopard is more bold than other animals. Ask the villagers. They are more afraid of the leopard than of anything else. A lion won’t come into a house, and an elephant can’t - but a leopard thinks nothing of creeping in through a door or window and seizing the first living thing it finds.’
    ‘Then why don’t the game scouts go out and kill all the leopards?’
    ‘A good question,’ his father agreed. ‘The answer is that in the scheme of nature the leopard has its place. For one thing, it keeps down the baboons. The leopard is very fond of baboon meat. If it weren’t for leopards, there would soon be such vast numbers of baboons that every farmer’s field would be stripped clean of every growing thing, and troops of baboons would become so bold that they would make raids upon village people and kill hundreds of them. That very thing has happened in parts of the country where there were no leopards.’
    Roger swatted a tsetse fly that had lit on his hand. He looked at his father with mischief in his eyes.
    ‘Well Dad, if everything is good for something, tell me what’s good about a tsetse?’
    Hunt grinned. ‘You think you’ve got me there, you young rascal. All right, I’ll tell you what’s good about a tsetse. First I’ll admit it’s the most dangerous fly in the world, because its bite can give you sleeping sickness. That can happen, but usually doesn’t - most tsetse bites are harmless. But the good thing about this bad fly is that without it you wouldn’t be looking now at thousands of wild animals. They just wouldn’t be here.’
    ‘How’s that?’
    ‘I remember once I was making a trip through the Tsavo game reserve with the warden and I swatted a tsetse. He said to me, ‘Don’t kill the tsetse. It’s our best friend. Without the tsetse we wouldn’t have any game park.’ I understood what he meant. The Africans raise millions of cattle and the cattle roam all over the land eating the grass right down to the roots, so that there is nothing left for the wild animals. But there is one place where the cattle can’t go. They can’t go into any area inhabited by tsetse flies, because the tsetse bite is deadly to cattle. So those parts of the country are left for the wild animals to enjoy.’
    ‘But don’t the flies kill the wild animals, too?’
    ‘No. The wild animals have been living with the tsetse for so many hundreds of years that they have become immune to tsetse bite - they are used to it, and it doesn’t hurt them. You notice this village has no cattle. That’s because this is a tsetse belt. Of course cattle are good to have, but it’s also good to have some places left where the most wonderful animals in all the world have a chance to exist.’
    Roger looked at the dead leopard which the men were beginning to skin. ‘Too bad we had to kill that one.’
    ‘Yes. But when they become man-eaters, we have to do something about it.’
    ‘Who gets that skin?’
    ‘The American Museum in New York has ordered one. If they don’t want it, some furrier will be glad to get it’
    ‘What’s it worth?”
    ‘About two hundred and thirty pounds.’
    ‘How many skins like that does it take to make a fur coat?’
    ‘About eight.’
    Roger whistled. ‘That makes a coat cost eighteen hundred pounds.’
    ‘More than that. The furrier wants to make a profit. He would sell a leopard-skin coat for two thousand five hundred pounds more or less, depending on the quality of the fur. This fur was out of fashion for a while but now it has come back strong. Probably because it’s hard to get Leopards are