What would you like to read?Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...Search books, authors, genres, shelves, users...
2 books
Frederick Courteney Selous, DSO (/səˈluː/; 31 December 1851 – 4 January 1917) was a British explorer, army officer, professional hunter, and conservationist, famous for his exploits in Southeast Africa. His real-life adventures inspired Sir Henry Rider Haggard to create the fictional character Allan Quatermain. Selous was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Russell Burnham. He was pre-eminent within a group of big game hunters that included Abel Chapman and Arthur Henry Neumann. He was the older brother of the ornithologist and writer Edmund Selous.
Along the banks of the river about here we found that the natives had dug a great number of pitfalls, about ten feet in depth, to entrap hippopotami, elephants, or buffaloes, which, being always placed in the pathways made by these animals, and neatly covered over with dry grass, are most difficult to detect, even when one knows there are such things about; but the unconscious traveller, ignorant of anything of the sort, is almost sure to be engulfed in one of them sooner or later. This happened to two of our party, neither of whom, luckily, was in any way hurt, after which we adopted the plan of letting one of the Kafirs walk in front, who gave us due notice of their whereabouts, by either uncovering them with an assegai or falling into them, an example which we were, of course, careful not to follow.