From all the other regions of Africa that are easily accessible to gunners, the animal life is vigorously being shot out, and no man in his senses will now say that the big game is breeding faster than it is being killed.  The reverse is painfully true.  Mr. Carl Akeley, in his quest for a really large male elephant for the American Museum found and looked over a thousand males without finding one that was really fine and typical.  All the photographs of elephant herds that were taken by Kermit Roosevelt and Akeley show a striking absence of adult males and of females with long tusks.  There are only young males, and young females with small, short tusks.  The answer is—­the white ivory hunters have killed nearly all the elephants bearing good ivory.

The slaughter of big game is going on furiously in British East Africa because the Uganda Railway opens up the entire territory to hunters.  Anyone, man or woman, who can raise $5,000 in cash can go there and make a huge “bag” of big game.  With a license costing only $250 he can kill enough big game to sink a ship.

The bag limit in British East Africa is ruinously extravagant.  If the government desires the extermination of the game, such a bag limit surely will promote that end.  It is awful to think that for a petty sum any man may buy the right to kill 300 head of hoofed and horned animals, of 44 species, not counting the carnivorous animals that also may be killed.  That bag limit should immediately be reduced 75 per cent!

As matters stand to-day in British East Africa, the big game of the country, outside the three preserves, is absolutely certain to disappear, in about one-fourth of the time that it took South Africa to accomplish the same result.  The reasons are obvious:—­superior accessibility, more deadly rifles, expert professional guides, and a widespread craze for killing big game.  With care and economy, British East Africa should furnish good hunting for two centuries, but as things are going on to-day, twenty years will see a tremendous change for the worse, and a disappearance of game that will literally astonish the natives.

German East Africa and Uganda will not exterminate their quotas of big game quite so soon.  The absence of railways is a great factor in game-existence.  The Congo Free State contains game and sporting possibilities—­on the unexplored uplands between the rivers,—­that are as yet totally unknown to sportsmen at large.  We are accustomed to thinking of the whole basin of the Congo as a vast, gloomy and impenetrable forest.

There is to-day in Africa a vast reserve supply of grand game.  It inhabits regions that are either unknown, or most difficult to penetrate.  As a species in point, consider the okapi.  Only the boldest and most persistent explorers ever have set foot in its tangled and miasmatic haunts.  It may be twenty years before a living specimen can be brought out.  The gorilla and the chimpanzee are so well protected by the density of their jungles that they never can be exterminated—­until the natives are permitted to have all the firearms that they desire!  When that day arrives, it is “good-night” to all the wild life that is large enough to eat or to wear.