It heard us and came at us through rather thick brush, snorting and tossing its head.

I am by no means sure that it had fixedly hostile intentions, and indeed with my present experience I think it likely that if I had not fired it would have flinched at the last moment and either retreated or gone by me.
But I am not a rhinoceros mind reader, and its actions were such as to warrant my regarding it as a suspicious character.

I stopped it with a couple of bullets, and then followed it up and killed it.

The skins of all these animals which I thus killed are in the National Museum at Washington.
But, as I said above, the only narrow escape I met with was not from one of these dangerous African animals, but from a grizzly bear.

It was about twenty-four years ago.