West with the Night

by Beryl Markham

wildebeest flaunting their brittle horns, or flinging themselves on the ground with the abandon of mad dervishes. I do not know why they do this, but whether it is a faulty sense of balance or merely a shameless recourse to the melodramatic, the wildebeest, if frightened by a plane, will always react in the manner of the circus clown in his frantic attempts to escape the trained spotted dog around and around the sawdust arena. With apology to clowns, if there are any left, I think the antics of the wildebeest, because they are less studied, are more amusing. This may be due to the fact that the wildebeest has two more legs to trip over — at least when he seems to need them most, they serve him least. When he wants to turn, he pirouettes, and when he wants to run, his progress is continually interrupted by a series of Keystone Comedy nose dives. How he gets from place to place with any dispatch would seem a mystery, but actually he does quite well when all is silent overhead — and there is no audience to watch him.