Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/251

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considerably lessened. This female had a baby which was hustled off by the rest of the band. The baby was crying piteously as it went.

This, added to the specimens on hand, brought the material for the group to one old male, two females, and a young male of about four years of age.

That night as I came into camp my mind went back to a certain day eleven years before when I was hunting lions on the Uasin Gishu Plateau with a moving-picture camera. A most wonderful opportunity had then been given me. Full in front of me the native hunters had drawn a lion's charge and killed the lion with their spears. But the opportunity had been as short-lived as it was magnificent, and the kind of camera I had then could not be handled that quickly. As I walked back to camp that night, I was determined to make a naturalist's moving-picture camera that would prevent my missing such a chance if ever such a one came my way again. From 1910 to 1916 I worked on this camera whenever I had a minute to spare. By 1917 I had the pleasure of knowing that it was used on observation planes destined for the battlefields of France. I had myself never had a chance to try my invention, except experimentally, until this trip to Africa. On this expedition I had brought two—a large one for panorama work and a smaller one nicknamed "the Gorilla" for animal work. "The Gorilla" had taken 300 feet of film of the animal that had heretofore never been taken alive in its native wilds by any camera still or moving. Few things have given me greater satisfac-