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near-moribund Miombo Research Center, had been one of Brian's first safari camps and also the site of an early game post. Among the courtesies extended to our expedition by the Game Department was a resident's permit to shoot impala, buffalo, and

    SAND RIVERS
    guinea fowl, to help feed its seventeen black and white participants, and after a fine first supper of impala and red wine, we sat around a campfire under the stars. Though at pains not to show it - he was already grumping about the scarcity of his beloved elephants - Brian Nicholson was very happy to be back. For the first time since I had met him, he did most of the talking, describing how he had first come to the Selous.
    At the age of sixteen, Brian Nicholson abandoned his formal schooling in Nairobi and went to work for the noted animal collector Carr Hartley, who paid him "one hundred shillings a month and posho (rations)" and gave him his first lessons in dealing with large wild animals. The next year he signed on with a professional hunter named Geoffrey Lawrence-Brown and made thirteen or fourteen safaris as an apprentice hunter in order to qualify for his professional hunter's license. But being a "white hunter" did not interest him. He had always wanted to be a game warden, which in those days, he said, meant living in the bush and hunting and shooting to protect the shambas of the local people from the depredations of wild animals, especially elephant and lion. No such jobs were available in Kenya to a youth of his experience, and in 1949, at the age of nineteen, he signed on as a "temporary assistant elephant control officer" assigned to the region of the ill-fated Ground-Nut Scheme, which had its main headquarters at Nachingwea, in southeastern Tanganyika. "My qualifications were virtually non-existent," Brian said, "but nobody else wanted the job."
    In its first years, the Ground-Nut Scheme was a threat to the southern Selous, which the planners thought might prove suitable for agriculture; in the absence of roads to Dar-es-Salaam, they planned to export 440,000 tons of ground-nuts annually through the new deep-water port being specially developed at Mtwara (where Maria's father was asked to set up a hospital, and where her sister Patricia was the first white baby to be born). But the Scheme collapsed under accumulated folly long before its grandiose ambitions could be implemented; among its many serious miscalculations was the failure to realize that by harvest time the ground-nuts planted in the soft mud of the rains would be locked under the hardpan of the dry season, and would have to be chipped out one by one. A little late, the planners asked themselves why this region was so thinly populated in the first place.
    Nicholson's supervisor was Constantine John Philip lonides, then Senior Game Warden of southeastern Tanganyika and already a notable collector of rare animals and poisonous snakes; it was he who reported, for example, that the green mamba and the Gabon viper, at that time considered to be largely West African in distribution, were in fact very common on the Makonde Plateau, where Tanganyika bordered Mozambique. (Maria's father, who remembers lonides with fondness, once told

    PETER MATTHIESSEN
    me that the hospital verandahs at Mtwara were a favorite place for collecting cobras.) lonides and young Nicholson took to each other straight av^ay, and the next year Brian transferred to lonides's headquarters at Liwale near the southeastern boundary of the Selous and began the long series of foot safaris that were to acquaint him with most of the southern country.
    By the time Nicholson appeared, in 1950, lonides considered that his great work of creation had been done; he was devoting more and more time to the hunting and collecting that had become his passions, and increasingly so as he realized that this new young assistant in elephant control whom the Africans called Bwana Kijana (the Young Bwana) was capable of taking over most of his duties