CHAPTER II ELEPHANT FRIENDS AND FOES
I have sat in the top of a tree in the middle of a herd a quarter of a mile from a native village in Uganda in a last desperate effort to inspect the two hundred and fifty elephants which had been chevying me about so fast that I had not had a chance to see whether there were any desirable specimens among them or not. I have spent a day and a night in the Budongo Forest in the middle of a herd of seven hundred elephants. I have stood on an ant-hill awaiting the rush of eleven elephants which had got my wind and were determined to get me. I have spent a day following and fighting an old bull which took twenty-five shots of our elephant rifles before he succumbed. And once also I had such close contact with an old bull up on the slopes of Mt. Kenia that I had to save myself from being gored by grabbing his tusks with my hands and swinging in between them.
I have spent many months studying elephants in Africa—on the plains, in the forests, in the bamboo, up on the mountains. I have watched them in herds and singly, studied their paths, their feeding grounds, everything about them I could, and I have come to the conclusion that of all the wild animals on this earth now, the African elephant is the most fascinating, and that man, for all the thousands of years he has known of elephants, knows mighty little about him. I am speaking only of the African elephant. He has not been domesticated as his Indian cousin has. The two are different in size and different in shape and different in habits. The low point of an African elephant's back line is the highest point of that of the Indian elephant. The African elephant's ears and tusks are larger, and his tusks usually spread wider at the points instead of coming together. Unless one studies him in his native haunts, one cannot get to know him. His disposition is held to be wilder than that of the Indian elephant, but the infrequency of his appearance in circuses and in zoölogical parks may be attributed to the ease with which tamed elephants may be obtained from India rather than to a difference of temper in the two beasts. An African elephant at Washington and one in the Bronx zoölogical park are the only ones I know of in this country, and no animal in captivity can give one more than a slight idea of his natural habits in his jungle home.
Very few people have studied African elephants in the field. Ninety-five per cent. of those who have followed them have been purely hunters and their desire has been, not to study, but to shoot—to see the elephant the shortest possible time. Time to judge the ivories and get a bead on the brain was all that they wanted. Of other elephant knowledge all that they needed was the simple facts of how to follow and find them. The comparatively few men who have tried to study the elephant have not gained as much knowledge as one would imagine, because without trying it one cannot realize how extremely difficult it is to study the live African elephant.
For example, as I said before, I spent a day with seven hundred elephants in the Budongo Forest, but although I heard them all the time and was very acutely conscious that they were near me, I do not believe that I actually had my eyes on an elephant more than half an hour, all told, during the day. It happened this way.
One night about dark, after a week or two of hunting, we heard the squeal of an elephant while we were sitting at dinner. A little later there were more squeals and occasional trumpeting—more and more, clearer and clearer—and by the time we had finished dinner the noise was only a mile or so away. It was a continuous row which suggested a tremendous herd. We went to bed early with elephants getting closer to camp all of the time. There is little danger of elephants attacking a camp, and, as there is no way to study them at night, about the only thing left to do was to go to bed and get in good shape for the next day. Along about midnight Mrs. Akeley came over to my tent and said that she had loaded my guns and that they were all ready. She could not sleep; so she went out to sit by the fire. The elephants were then within a hundred yards of our tents and there was a continuous roar made up of trumpetings, squealing, and the crashing of bushes and trees.
A BIG SPECIMEN IN THE FIELD
To photograph, measure, and skin an animal the size of this one requires eight or ten hours of work
even with the assistance of forty or fifty negro boys
MR. AKELEY'S SAFARI LADEN WITH ELEPHANT SKINS
I got up in the morning and had breakfast before daybreak. The elephants had moved on down the edge of the forest. What had been a jungle of high grass and bush the day before was trampled flat. There were at least seven hundred elephants in the herd—government officials had counted them on the previous day as they came down. I followed the trails to the edge of the forest but saw none. I started back to cross a little nullah (a dry water course), but felt suspicious and decided to look the situation over a little more closely. I ran up on a sloping rock and, almost under me on the other side, I saw the back of a large elephant. Over to one side there was another one, beyond that another, and then I realized that the little nullah through which I had planned to pass was very well sprinkled with them. I backed off and went up to a higher rock to one side. Elephants were drifting into the forest from all directions. The sun was just coming up over the hills and was shining upon the forest, which sparkled in the sunlight—morning greetings to the forest people. The monkeys greeted one another with barks and coughs. Everything was waking up—it was a busy day. There was not a breath of air. I had gone back a million years; the birds were calling back and forth, the monkeys were calling to one another, a troop of chimpanzees in the open screamed, and their shouts were answered from another group inside the forest. All the forest life was awake and moving about as that huge herd of elephants, singly and in groups, flowed into the forest from the plain. There was one continuous roar of noise, all the wild life joining, but above it all were the crashing of trees and the squealing of the elephants as they moved into the forest on a front at least a mile wide. It was the biggest show I ever saw in Africa.
Then an old cow just at the edge of the forest suddenly got my wind, and wheeling about, she let out a scream. Instantly every sound ceased, everything was quiet. The monkeys, the birds—all the wild life—stopped their racket; the elephants stood still, listening and waiting. For a moment I was dazed. The thought came through my mind—"What does it all mean? Have I been dreaming?" But soon I heard the rustling of the trees as though a great storm were coming. There was no movement of the air, but there was the sound of a wind storm going through a forest. It gradually died away, and I realized that the elephants had made it as they moved off. It was the rustling of the dry leaves on the ground under their feet and the rubbing of their bodies through the dried foliage of the forest. I never heard a noise like that made by elephants—before or since. The conditions were unique, for everything was thoroughly parched, and there had not even been a dew. Ordinarily, if there is any moisture, elephants when warned can travel through a forest without the slightest noise. In spite of their great bulk they are as silent and sometimes as hard to see in their country as a jack rabbit is in his. I remember on one occasion being so close to an old cow in the jungle that I could hear the rumbling of her stomach, and yet when she realized my presence the rumbling ceased, as it always does when they are suspicious, and she left the clump of growth she was in without my hearing a sound.
But going back to the big herd. From the time I had seen the first elephant until the last of them disappeared in the forest it had been perhaps fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes in which to see the sight of a lifetime, a thing to go to Africa a dozen times to get one glimpse of. But what did I learn about the habits of the elephant in that fifteen minutes? A little perhaps but not much. It takes a long time and much patience to get at all intimate with old Tembo, as the Swahilis call him, on his native soil.
After the herd disappeared in the forest I watched for ten or fifteen minutes and heard the squeal of the elephants and the noise of the monkeys again. Their suspicions were over. I followed into the forest where the trails showed me that they had broken up into small bands. I followed along on the trail of one of these bands until I got a glimpse of an elephant about fifty yards ahead of me in the trail. You don't see a whole elephant in the forest. What you do see is just a glimpse of hide or tusk or trunk through the trees. And if you want to get this glimpse without disturbing him you must do your glimpsing from down the wind.
There was a little open space ahead of the group I was following. I worked around until I got to a place where I could see them as they passed through this open space. They were moving along slowly, feeding. Two or three came out into the opening, then they became suspicious and wheeled into the forest again. I followed cautiously. I had gone only a short distance when I saw a very young calf about twenty yards ahead of me. As I halted, the mother came trotting back down the trail looking for the baby. I froze to the side of a tree with my gun ready. She came to the baby and turning, boosted it along with her trunk after the rest of the herd. I followed along after them into an opening where I found them rounded up in a patch of burned-over ground. They were milling around in a rather compact mass seemingly preparing for defence. I could not see very plainly, for a cloud of dust rose from the burned ground as they shuffled about. I stood watching them a little time and suddenly caught sight of a fine tusk—an old bull and just what I wanted for the group I was working on for the Museum of Natural History. I ran up behind a bush at the edge of the clearing and peeked through it. There, not more than twenty yards from me, was my bull, partially exposed and partially covered by the other animals. I could not get a shot at his brain as he was standing, but the foreleg on my side was forward exposing his side so that I had a good shot at his heart—a shot I had never made before. The heart is eighteen or twenty inches long and perhaps a foot up and down—a good mark in size if one's guess at its location is accurate. If you can hit an elephant's vertebræ and break his back you can kill him. You can kill him by hitting his heart, or by hitting his brain. If you hit him anywhere else you are not likely to hurt him much and the brain and heart shots are the only safe bets. I fired at his heart with both barrels and then grabbed my other gun from the gun boy, ready for their rush, but the whole herd, including the old bull, made off in the other direction, raising a cloud of dust. I ran around and climbed an ant-hill four or five feet high to keep them in sight.
When I caught sight of them they had gone about fifty yards and had stopped. And then I did learn something about elephants. My old bull was down on the ground on his side. Around him were ten or twelve other elephants trying desperately with their trunks and tusks to get him on his feet again. They were doing their best to rescue their wounded comrade. They moved his great bulk fifteen or twenty feet in their efforts, but were unable to get him up. I don't know of any other big animals that will do this. I had heard stories that elephants had the chivalry to stick by their wounded and help them, but I was never sure myself until I had actually seen this instance. Some time later Major Harrison, a very experienced elephant hunter and a keen observer, told me of an even more remarkable instance that he had seen. He was shooting in the Congo and came upon four big bulls. One he killed and another he wounded. The wounded one went down but the two survivors helped him regain his feet, and with one on each side helping him the three moved off. Although Major Harrison followed the rest of the day he was not able to catch up with them.
I did not see the end of their efforts to raise the bull I had shot, for those that were not helping him began to circle about with their ears out to hear anything of their enemy and with their trunks up feeling for my wind. They were moving in ever-increasing circles which threatened to envelop my ant-hill, and I beat a hasty retreat. Not long after they evidently were convinced that the bull was dead and all together they moved away. I then went to the body. He was dead, but as we approached there was a reflex action which twitched his trunk from time to time. This frightened the gun boys so that I went up and slapped the elephant's eye, the customary test, and as there was no reaction the boys were convinced. When I looked the carcass over I was disappointed to find that only one of his tusks was big and well developed. The other was smaller, and out of shape from an injury; consequently I decided not to take him for the museum group. He was, however, a good deal of a temptation, for he was one of the largest elephants I had ever seen, measuring eleven feet four inches to the top of his shoulders, and the circumference of his front foot was sixty-seven and a half inches. To the best of my knowledge this is a record size by about four inches. I did not even skin him but contented myself with taking his tusks, which I sold for nearly $500 without even going down to Nairobi.
The phenomenon of elephants helping each other when wounded is not general by any means. Only a few days after shooting the big bull I had an instance of elephants abandoning one of their number that was wounded and not very badly wounded, either.
I had gone into the forest again, and had come upon another bunch in very thick country. I could only get little glimpses of a patch of hide or ivory once in a while. After working along with them for a while in the hope of getting into more open ground I tried the experiment of beating on the tree trunks with sticks. This was new to them as it was to me. I felt sure it would make them run but I wasn't sure whether they would go toward it or away from it. Happily they bolted from the forest into the high grass, grumbling all the while. I followed as closely as I dared until finally, in hope of getting a view over the top of the high grass, I started to climb a tree. Just then they rushed back into the forest, fortunately to one side of me. I thought it was time to quit, so we started back to camp. At that moment I heard another group of elephants. They were coming out of the forest into the grass. I climbed up an ant-hill where I could see them as they passed over a ridge. There were eleven of them and not a specimen that I wanted among them. I stood watching to see what would happen next. They were about three hundred yards away when they got my wind. Back they came, rumbling, trumpeting, and squealing. I knew that I had trouble on my hands. The only thing for me to do was to stick, for if I got down in the tall grass I couldn't see anything at all. They came up over a hill, but they were not coming straight toward me and it looked as if they would pass me at forty or fifty yards; but, unfortunately, the cow in front saw me standing in full view on my ant-hill pedestal. They turned straight at me. When the leading cow was as close as I wanted her to get—about twenty-five yards—I fired. She hesitated but again surged on with the others. A second shot knocked her down. The rest surged past her, turned, smelled of her, and ran off into the forest. After a few minutes she got upon her feet and rather groggily went off after them.
Elephants have the reputation of having very bad eyesight. I personally am of the opinion that their sight is pretty good, but on this subject, as on most others about elephants, information is neither complete nor accurate. But my experience makes me think that they can see pretty well. In this case the cow that saw me was only about fifty yards away, but at another time on the Uasin Gishu Plateau an elephant herd charged me from 250 yards with the wind from them to me. The behaviour of this particular herd gave me a clue to their reputation for bad eyesight. The elephant is not afraid of any animal except man, and consequently he is not on the alert for moving objects as are animals that are hunted. Neither does he eat other animals, so he is not interested in their movements as a hunter. In fact, he isn't normally particularly interested in moving objects at all. He pays no attention. When we first came up with this herd on the Uasin Gishu Plateau we could move around within fifty yards of them without attracting their attention. However, after they got our wind and recognized us as enemies, they were able to see us at a distance of 250 yards, and charge us.
But however good the elephant's sight, it is nothing in comparison with his smelling ability. An elephant's trunk is probably the best smelling apparatus in the world, and he depends on his sense of smell more than on any other sense. When he is at all suspicious he moves his trunk around in every direction so that he catches the slightest taint in the air, from whichever way it comes. I have often seen elephants, when disturbed, with their trunks high in air reaching all around for my wind. I likewise, on one occasion, had an intimate view of a very quiet smelling operation by which an old cow escaped me. I was on an elephant path one day on Mt. Kenia looking for an elephant I had heard, when my gun-bearer gripped my shoulder and pointed into the forest. I looked and looked but could see nothing but the trees. Finally I noticed that one of the trees diminished in size toward the ground and I recognized an elephant's trunk. My eyes followed it down. At the very tip it was curled back, and this curled-back part, with the nostrils distended, was moving slowly from side to side quietly fishing for my wind. She was waiting concealed beside the trail to pick me up as I came along. She was no more than forty feet away, but when she decided to give up and moved away, I could not hear her going although it was a dense forest and she was accompanied by two youngsters. Very often in the forest where there is very little air stirring it is hard to tell the direction of the wind. I used to light wax taper matches as tests, for they could be struck without any noise and the flame would show the direction of the slightest breath of air.
In many other ways besides its smelling ability the elephant's trunk is the most extraordinary part of this most extraordinary animal. A man's arm has a more or less universal joint at the shoulder. The elephant's trunk is absolutely flexible at every point. It can turn in any direction and in whatever position it is, and has tremendous strength. There is no bone in it, of course, but it is constructed of interwoven muscle and sinew so tough that one can hardly cut it with a knife. An elephant can shoot a stream of water out of it that would put out a fire; lift a tree trunk weighing a ton and throw it easily; or it is delicate enough to pull a blade of grass with. He drinks with it, feeds himself with it, smells with it, works with it, and at times fights with it. Incidentally, a mouse that endeavoured to frighten an elephant by the traditional nursery rhyme method of running up his trunk would be blown into the next county. There is nothing else like an elephant's trunk on earth.
And for that matter, there is nothing else like the elephant. He has come down to us through the ages, surviving the conditions which killed off his earlier contemporaries, and he now adapts himself perfectly to more different conditions than any other animal in Africa.
He can eat anything that is green or ever has been green, just so long as there is enough of it. He can get his water from the aloe plants on the arid plains, or dig a well in the sand of a dry river bed with his trunk and fore feet, and drink there, or he is equally at home living half in the swamps of better-watered regions. He is at home on the low, hot plains of the seacoast at the equator or on the cool slopes of Kenia and Elgon. So far as I know, he suffers from no contagious diseases and has no enemies except man. There are elephants on Kenia that have never lain down for a hundred years. Some of the plains elephants do rest lying down, but no one ever saw a Kenia elephant lying down or any evidence that he does lie down to rest. The elephant is a good traveller. On good ground a good horse can outrun him, but on bad ground the horse would have no chance, and there are few animals that can cover more ground in a day than an elephant. And in spite of his appearance, he can turn with surprising agility and move through the forest as quietly as a rabbit.
An elephant's foot is almost as remarkable as his trunk. In the first place, his foot is encased in a baglike skin with a heavy padded bottom, with some of the characteristics of an anti-skid tire. An elephant walks on his toes. His toes form the front part of his foot and the bones of his foot run not only back but up. Underneath these bones at the back of his foot is a gelatine-like substance, which is a much more effective shock absorber than rubber heels or any other device. One of the curious things about this kind of a foot is that it swells out when the weight is on it and contracts when the weight is removed. As a consequence an elephant may sink four feet into a swamp but the minute he begins to lift his legs, his feet will contract and come out of the hole they have made without suction. The elephant's leg, being practically a perpendicular shaft, requires less muscular effort for him to stand than it does for ordinary animals. This is one of the reasons why he can go for a century without lying down.
A map of the elephant country showing Mt. Elgon and Mt. Kenia, on whose slopes Mr. Akeley has hunted elephants. It was on
Mt. Kenia that Mr. Akeley was mauled by an old bull
A country that elephants have long inhabited takes on some of the particular interest of the animals themselves. I believe that before the white man came to East Africa the elephant was nearly as much a plains animal as a forest animal, but he now tends to stay in the forests where the risk is not so great. On the plains there are no elephant paths now, if there ever were, for in open country elephants do not go in single file. But in the forests there are elephant paths everywhere. In fact, if it were not for the elephant paths travel in the forest would be almost impossible, and above the forests in the bamboo country this is equally true. One travels practically all the time on their trails and they go everywhere except in the tree ferns. Tree fern patches are not very extensive, but I have never seen an elephant track or an elephant in them. The elephants are constantly changing the paths for various reasons; among others, because the natives are in the habit of digging elephant pits in the trails. But there are some trails that have evidently been used for centuries. One time we had followed a band of elephants on the Aberdare Plateau and had devilled them until they began to travel away. We followed until the trail led through a pass in the mountains and we realized that they were going into a different region altogether. That trail in the pass was a little wider than an elephant's foot and worn six inches deep in the solid rock. It must have taken hundreds of years for the shuffling of elephants to wear that rock away.
At another place on Kenia I found an elephant passage of a stream where the trail was twenty feet wide. Single paths came in from many directions on one side of the stream and joined in this great boulevard, which crossed the stream and broke up again on the other side into the single paths radiating again in every direction. In many places where the topography of the ground is such that there is only one place for a trail there will be unmistakable evidence that the trails have stayed in the same place many years—such as trees rubbed half in two by the constant passing of the animals or damp rocks polished by the caress of their trunks. And along all the trails, old and new, are elephant signs, footprints, dung, and gobs of chewed wood and bark from which they have extracted the juices before spitting them out.
But finding the elephants is not so frequent or easy as the multiplicity of the signs would indicate. One reason is that the signs of elephants—tracks, rubbed trees, and so forth—are more or less enduring, many of them being very plain in places where the elephants have not been for months or even years. If, however, you come on fresh elephant tracks, not more than a day old, you can usually catch up with the elephants, for as they feed along through the country they do not go fast. Only if they are making a trek from one region to another it may take much longer to catch them.
Once up with an elephant, if you are shooting, you are pretty sure that, even if he is charging you, a bullet from an elephant gun, hitting him in the head, will stop him even if it does not hit him in a vital spot. Moreover, if you stop the leader of a bunch that is charging you, the bunch will stop. I never heard of a case in which the leader of an elephant charge was stopped and the others kept on, and I doubt if we ever will hear of such a thing, for if it does happen there won't be any one to tell about it. It is unusual for an elephant to keep on after being hit even if the hit does not knock him down. The old cow that charged me at the head of ten others was rather the exception to this rule, for after my first shot stopped her she came on again until my second shot knocked her down. But I had one experience that was entirely at variance with this rule. One old bull took thirteen shots from my rifle and about as many from Mrs. Akeley's before he was content either to die or run away.
In Uganda, after six months in the up-country after elephants, we decided to go down to the Uasin Gishu Plateau for lion spearing, for the rainy season was beginning and the vegetation growing so thick that elephant hunting was getting very difficult. On the way down we came one morning upon the fresh trail of a herd of elephants. We followed for about two hours in a high bush country over which were scattered clumps of trees. Finally we came upon the elephants at the time of their mid-day siesta. The middle of the day is the quietest time of the twenty-four hours with elephants. If they are in a herd, they will bunch together in the shade. They do not stand absolutely still, but mill about very slowly, changing positions in the bunch but not leaving. They are neither feeding nor travelling but, as nearly as they ever do, resting. I even saw a young bull once rest his tusks in the crotch of a tree during this resting period. We got up to within twenty-five yards of them behind some bushes down the wind. We finally decided upon one of the bulls as the target. Mrs. Akeley studied carefully and shot. The bull went down, apparently dead. Ordinarily, we should rush in for a finishing shot, but in this case the rest of the herd did not make off promptly, so we stood still. When they did go off we started toward the apparently dead animal. As we did so, he got upon his feet and, in spite of a volley from us, kept on after the herd. We followed, and after half an hour's travel we caught sight of him again. We kept along behind him, looking for a place where we could swing out to one side and get abreast to fire a finishing shot at him. He was moving slowly and groggily. It was hard to move anywhere except in his trail without making a noise, and I suddenly discovered that the trail was turning so that the wind was from us to him.
Immediately we swung off to one side, but it was too late. I didn't see him when he got our wind but I knew perfectly he had it for there was the sudden crash of his wheel in the bushes and a scream. An elephant's scream is loud and shrill and piercing. And it is terrifying, too—at least to any one who knows elephants—for it means an angry animal and usually a charge. Then came a series of grunts and rumblings. A second or two later he came in sight, his ears spread out twelve feet from tip to tip, his trunk up and jerking fiercely from side to side. There is no way of describing how big an elephant looks under these conditions, or the speed at which he comes. At about thirty yards I shot, but he took it. He stopped, seemingly puzzled but unhurt. I shot the second barrel and looked for my other gun which was thirty feet behind me. The boy ran up with it and I emptied both barrels into the elephant's head, and still he took it like a sand hill. In the meanwhile, Mrs. Akeley had been firing, too. And then he turned and went off again. I went back to Mrs. Akeley. Everything that I knew about elephant shooting had failed to apply in this case. I had stopped him with one shot. That was normal enough. But then I had put three carefully aimed shots into his head at short range, any one of which should have killed him. And he had taken them with only a slight flinch and then had gone off. I felt completely helpless. Turning to Mrs. Akeley, I said:
"This elephant is pretty well shot up, and perhaps we had better wait for developments."
She said: "No, we started it; so let's finish it."
I agreed as we reloaded, and we were about to start following when his screaming, grunting, roaring attack began again. Exactly the same thing happened as the first time except that this time Mrs. Akeley, the boy, and I were all together. We fired as we had before. He stopped with the first shot and took all the others standing, finally turning and retreating again. Apparently our shots had no effect except to make him stop and think. I was sick of it, for maybe next time he wouldn't stop and evidently we couldn't knock him down. We had about finished reloading when we heard him once more. There was nothing to do but stand the charge, for to run was fatal. So we waited. There was an appreciable time when I could hear his onrush but couldn't see him. Then I caught sight of him. He wasn't coming straight for us, but was charging at a point thirty yards to one side of us and thrashing back and forth a great branch of tree in his trunk. Why his charge was so misdirected I didn't know, but I was profoundly grateful. As he ran I had a good brain shot from the side. I fired, and he fell stone dead. With the greatest sense of relief in the world I went over to him. As I stood by the carcass I felt very small indeed. Mrs. Akeley sat down and drew a long breath before she spoke.
"I want to go home," she said at last, "and keep house for the rest of my life."
Then I heard a commotion in the bush in front of the dead elephant and as I looked up a black boy carrying a cringing monkey appeared. Only the boy wasn't black. He was scared to an ashen colour and he was still trembling, and the monkey was as frightened as the boy. It was J. T. Jr., Mrs. Akeley's pet monkey, and Alli, the monkey's nurse. They had followed to see the sport without our knowledge, and they had drawn the elephant's last charge.
This experience with an animal that continued to make charge after charge was new to me. It has never happened again and I hope never will, but it shows that with elephants it isn't safe to depend on any fixed rule, for elephants vary as much as people do. This one was the heaviest-skulled elephant I ever saw, and the shots that I had fired would have killed any ordinary animal. But in his case all but the last shot had been stopped by bone.
I couldn't measure his height, but I measured his ear as one indication of his size. It was the biggest I ever heard of. And his tusks were good sized—80 pounds. He was a very big animal, but his foot measurement was not so large as the big bull of the Budongo Forest. Later I made a dining table of his ear, supporting it on three tusks for legs. With the wooden border it was eight feet long and seated eight people very comfortably.
Most wild animals, if they smell man and have an opportunity to get away, make the most of it. Even a mother with young will usually try to escape trouble rather than bring it on, although, of course, they are quickest to fight. But elephants are not always in this category. In the open it has been my experience that they would rather leave than provoke a fight; if you hunt elephants in the forest, you are quite likely to find that two can play the hunting game, and find yourself pretty actively hunted by the elephants. If the elephants after you are making a noise, it gives you a good chance. When they silently wait for you, the game is much more dangerous.
The old bull, who is in the centre of the elephant group in the Museum of Natural History now, tried to get me by this silent method. I was out on a trail and I saw that a big bunch of animals were near. I wasn't following any particular trail for they had moved about so that signs were everywhere and much confused. Finally I came to a gully. It wasn't very broad or very deep, but the trail I was on turned up it to where a crossing could be made on the level. The forest here was high and very thick, and consequently it was quite dark. As I looked up the trail I saw a group of big shapes through the branches. I thought they were elephants and peered carefully at them, but they turned out to be boulders. A minute later I saw across the gully another similar group of boulders, but as I peered at them I saw through a little opening in the leaves, plain and unmistakable, an elephant's tusk. I watched it carefully. It moved a little, and behind it I caught a glimpse of the other tusk. They were big, and I decided that he would do for my group. I couldn't get a glimpse of his eye or anything to sight by, so I carefully calculated where his brain ought to be from the place where his tusk entered his head, and fired. Then there was the riot of an elephant herd suddenly starting. A few seconds later there was a crash. "He's down," I thought, and Bill, the gun boy, and I ran over to the place where the animals had been. We followed their tracks a little way and found where one of the elephants had been down, but he had recovered and gone on. However, he had evidently gone off by himself when he got up, for while the others had gone down an old trail he had gone straight through the jungle, breaking a new way as he went. With Bill in the lead, we pushed along behind him. It was a curious trail, for it went straight ahead without deviation as if it had been laid by compass. One hour went by and then another. We had settled down for a long trek. The going wasn't very good and the forest was so thick that we could not see in any direction. We were pushing along in this fashion when, with a crash and a squeal, an elephant burst across our path within fifteen feet of us. It was absolutely without warning, and had the charge been straight on us we could hardly have escaped. As it was, I fired two hurried shots as he disappeared in the growth on the opposite side of the trail. The old devil had grown tired of being hunted and had doubled back on his own trail to wait for us. He had been absolutely silent. We hadn't heard a thing, and his plan failed, I think, only because the growth was so thick that he charged us on scent or sound without being able to see us. I heard him go through the forest a way and then stop. I followed until I found a place a little more open than the rest, and with this between me and the trees he was in I waited. I could hear him grumbling in there from time to time. I didn't expect him to last much longer so I got my lunch and ate it while I listened and watched. I had just finished and had a puff or two on my pipe when he let out another squeal and charged. He evidently had moved around until he had wind of me. I didn't see him but I heard him, and grabbing the gun I stood ready. But he didn't come. Instead I heard the breaking of the bushes as he collapsed. His last effort had been too much for him.
The efforts of the next elephant who tried the quiet waiting game on me were almost too much for me.
We had just come down from the ice fields seventeen thousand feet up on the summit of Mt. Kenia, overlord of the game regions of British East Africa, and had come out of the forest directly south of the pinnacle and within two or three miles of an old camping ground in the temperate climate, five or six thousand feet above sea level, where we had camped five years before and again one year before. Instead of going on around toward the west to the base camp we decided to stop here and have the base camp brought up to us. Mrs. Akeley was tired, so she said she would stay at the camp and rest; and I decided to take advantage of the time it would take to bring up the base camp to go back into the bamboo and get some forest photographs.
There was perfectly good elephant country around our camp but I wanted to go back up where the forests stop and the bamboo flourishes, because it was a bamboo setting that I had selected for the group of elephants I was then working on for the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History. I started out with four days' rations, gun boys, porters, camera men, and so forth—fifteen men in all. The second day out brought me to about nine thousand feet above sea level where the bamboo began. Following a well-worn elephant trail in search of this photographic material, I ran on to a trail of three old bulls. The tracks were old—probably as much as four days—but the size was so unusual that I decided to postpone the photography and follow them. I did not expect to have to catch up their four days' travel, for I hoped that they would be feeding in the neighbourhood and that the trail I was on would cross a fresher trail made in their wanderings around for food. I had run upon their tracks first about noon. I followed until dark without finding any fresher signs. The next morning we started out at daybreak and finally entered an opening such as elephants use as a feeding ground. It is their custom to mill around in these openings, eating the vegetation and trampling it down until it offers little more, and then move on. In six months or so it will be grown up again eight or ten feet high and they are very apt to revisit it and go through the same process again. Soon after we entered this opening I came suddenly upon fresh tracks of the elephants I had been following. Not only were the tracks fresh but the droppings were still steaming and I knew that the animals were not far away; certainly they had been there not more than an hour before. I followed the trail amongst the low bush in the opening but it merely wandered about repeatedly bringing me back to the place where I had first seen the fresh tracks, and I realized that I might do this indefinitely without getting closer to the elephants. I decided to go outside the opening and circle around it to see if I could find the trail of my bulls as they entered the forest. This opening was at the point on the mountain where the forest proper and the bamboos merged. I followed an elephant path out of the opening on the bamboo side and had gone but a little way when I discovered fresh signs of my three bulls, who had evidently left the opening by the same path that I was following, and at about the same time I heard the crackling of bamboo ahead, probably about two hundred yards away. This was the signal for preparation for the final stalk.
I stood for a moment watching one of the trackers going up the trail to a point where it turned at right angles in the direction of the sounds I had heard. There he stopped at rest, having indicated to me by signs that they had gone in that direction. I turned my back to the trail, watching the porters select a place to lay down their loads amidst a clump of large trees that would afford some protection in case of a stampede in their direction. The gun boys came forward presenting the guns for inspection. I took the gun from the second boy, sending him back with the porters. After examining this gun I gave it to the first boy and took his. When I had examined this I leaned it against my body while I chafed my hands which were numb from the cold mists of the morning, knowing that I might soon need a supple trigger finger. During this time the first gun boy was taking the cartridges, one by one, from his bandoleer and holding them up for my inspection—the ordinary precaution to insure that all the ammunition was the right kind, and an important insurance, because only a full steel-jacketed bullet will penetrate an elephant's head. While still warming my hands, inspecting the cartridges, and standing with the gun leaning against my stomach, I was suddenly conscious that an elephant was almost on top of me. I have no knowledge of how the warning came. I have no mental record of hearing him, seeing him, or of any warning from the gun boy who faced me and who must have seen the elephant as he came down on me from behind. There must have been some definite signal, but it was not recorded in my mind. I only know that as I picked up my gun and wheeled about I tried to shove the safety catch forward. It refused to budge, and I remember the thought that perhaps I had left the catch forward when I inspected the gun and that if not I must pull the triggers hard enough to fire the gun anyway. This is an impossibility, but I remember distinctly the determination to do it, for the all-powerful impulse in my mind was that I must shoot instantly. Then something happened that dazed me. I don't know whether I shot or not. My next mental record is of a tusk right at my chest. I grabbed it with my left hand, the other one with my right hand, and swinging in between them went to the ground on my back. This swinging in between the tusks was purely automatic. It was the result of many a time on the trails imagining myself caught by an elephant's rush and planning what I would do, and a very profitable planning, too; for I am convinced that if a man imagines such a crisis and plans what he would do, he will, when the occasion occurs, automatically do what he planned. Anyway, I firmly believe that my imaginings along the trail saved my life.
He drove his tusks into the ground on either side of me, his curled-up trunk against my chest. I had a realization that I was being crushed, and as I looked into one wicked little eye above me I knew I could expect no mercy from it. This thought was perfectly clear and definite in my mind. I heard a wheezy grunt as he plunged down and then—oblivion.
The thing that dazed me was a blow from the elephant's trunk as he swung it down to curl it back out of harm's way. It broke my nose and tore my cheek open to the teeth. Had it been an intentional blow it would have killed me instantly. The part of the trunk that scraped off most of my face was the heavy bristles on the knuckle-like corrugations of the skin of the under side.
When he surged down on me, his big tusks evidently struck something in the ground that stopped them. Of course my body offered practically no resistance to his weight, and I should have been crushed as thin as a wafer if his tusks hadn't met that resistance—stone, root, or something—underground. He seems to have thought me dead for he left me—by some good fortune not stepping on me—and charged off after the boys. I never got much information out of the boys as to what did happen, for they were not proud of their part in the adventure. However, there were plenty of signs that the elephant had run out into the open space again and charged all over it; so it is reasonable to assume that they had scattered through it like a covey of quail and that he had trampled it down trying to find the men whose tracks and wind filled the neighbourhood.
Usually, when an elephant kills a man, it will return to its victim and gore him again, or trample him, or pull his legs or arms off with its trunk. I knew of one case where a man's porters brought in his arm which the elephant that had killed him had pulled off his body and left lying on the ground. In my case, happily, the elephant for some reason did not come back. I lay unconscious for four or five hours. In the meanwhile, when they found the coast was clear, the porters and gun boys returned and made camp, intending, no doubt, to keep guard over my body until Mrs. Akeley, to whom they had sent word, could reach me. They did not, however, touch me, for they believed that I was dead, and neither the Swahili Mohammedans nor the Kikuyus will touch a dead man. So they built a fire and huddled around it and I lay unconscious in the cold mountain rain at a little distance, with my body crushed and my face torn open. About five o'clock I came to in a dazed way and was vaguely conscious of seeing a fire. I shouted, and a little later I felt myself being carried by the shoulders and legs. Later again I had a lucid spell and realized that I was lying in one of the porter's tents, and I got clarity of mind enough to ask where my wife was. The boys answered that she was back in camp. That brought the events back to me, how I had left her at camp, found the trail of the three old bulls, followed them and, finally, how I was knocked out. I was entirely helpless. I could move neither my arms nor legs and I reached the conclusion that my back was broken. I could not move, but I felt no pain whatever. However, my coldness and numbness brought to my mind a bottle of cocktails, and I ordered one of the boys to bring it to me. My powers of resistance must have been very low, for he poured all there was in the bottle down my throat. In the intervals of consciousness, also, I got them to give me hot bovril—a British beef tea—and quinine. The result of all this was that the cold and numbness left me. I moved my arms. The movement brought pain, but I evidently wasn't entirely paralyzed. I moved my toes, then my feet, then my legs. "Why," I thought in some surprise, "my back isn't broken at all!" So before I dropped off again for the night I knew that I had some chance of recovery. The first time I regained consciousness in the morning, I felt that Mrs. Akeley was around. I asked the boys if she had come. They said no, and I told them to fire my gun every fifteen minutes. Then I dropped off into unconsciousness again and awoke to see her sitting by me on the ground.
When the elephant got me, the boys had sent two runners to tell Mrs. Akeley. They arrived about six in the evening. It was our custom when separated to send notes to each other, or at least messages. When these boys came on to say that an elephant had got me, and when she found that there was no word from me, it looked bad. Mrs. Akeley sent word to the nearest government post for a doctor and started her preparations to come to me that night. She had to go after her guides, even into the huts of a native village, for they did not want to start at night. Finally, about midnight, she got under way. She pushed along with all speed until about daybreak, when the guides confessed that they were lost. At this juncture she was sitting on a log, trying to think what to do next. And then she heard my gun. She answered, but it was more than an hour before the sounds of her smaller rifle reached our camp. And about an hour after the boys heard her gun she arrived.
She asked me how I was, and I said that I was all right. I noticed a peculiar expression on her face. If I had had a looking glass, I should probably have understood it better. One eye was closed and the forehead over it skinned. My nose was broken and my cheek cut so that it hung down, exposing my teeth. I was dirty all over, and from time to time spit blood from the hemorrhages inside. Altogether, I was an unlovely subject and looked hardly worth saving. But I did get entirely over it all, although it took me three months in bed. The thing that was serious was that the elephant had crushed several of my ribs into my lungs, and these internal injuries took a long time to heal. As a matter of fact, I don't suppose I would have pulled through even with Mrs. Akeley's care if it hadn't been for a Scotch medical missionary who nearly ran himself to death coming to my rescue. He had been in the country only a little while and perhaps this explains his coming so fast when news reached him of a man who had been mauled by an elephant. The chief medical officer at Fort Hall, knowing better what elephant mauling usually meant, came, but he didn't hurry. I saw him later and he apologized, but I felt no grievance. I understood the situation. Usually when an elephant gets a man a doctor can't do anything for him.
But this isn't always so. Some months later I sat down in the hotel at Nairobi with three other men, who like myself had been caught by elephants and had lived to tell the tale. An elephant caught Black in his trunk, and threw him into a bush that broke his fall. The elephant followed him and stepped on him, the bush this time forming a cushion that saved him, and although the elephant returned two or three times to give him a final punch, he was not killed. However, he was badly broken up.
Outram and a companion approached an elephant that was shot and down, when the animal suddenly rose, grabbed Outram in his trunk and threw him. The elephant followed him, but Outram scrambled into the grass while the elephant trampled his pith helmet into the ground, whereupon Outram got right under the elephant's tail and stuck to this position while the elephant turned circles trying to find him, until, becoming faint from his injuries, Outram dived into the grass at one side. Outram's companion by this time got back into the game and killed the elephant.
Hutchinson's story I have forgotten a little now, but I remember that he said the elephant caught him, brushed the ground with him, and then threw him. The elephant followed him and Hutchinson put off fate a few seconds by somehow getting amongst the elephant's legs. The respite was enough, for the gun boy, by this time, began firing and drove the elephant off.
In all of these cases, unlike mine, the elephants had used their trunks to pick up their victims and to throw them, and they had intended finishing them by trampling on them. This use of the trunk seems more common than the charge with the tusks that had so nearly finished me. Up in Somaliland Dudo Muhammud, my gun boy, showed me the spot where he had seen an elephant kill an Italian prince. The elephant picked the prince up in his trunk and beat him against his tusks, the prince, meanwhile, futilely beating the elephant's head with his fists. Then the elephant threw him upon the ground, walked on him, and then squatted on him, rubbing back and forth until he had rubbed his body into the ground.
But elephants do use their tusks and use them with terrible effect. About the time we were in the Budongo Forest, Mr. and Mrs. Longdon were across Lake Albert in the Belgian Congo. One day Longdon shot a bull elephant and stood watching the herd disappear, when a cow came down from behind, unheard and unseen, ran her tusk clear through him and, with a toss of her head, threw him into the bush and went on. Longdon lived four days.
But although the elephant is a terrible fighter in his own defence when attacked by man, that is not his chief characteristic. The things that stick in my mind are his sagacity, his versatility, and a certain comradeship which I have never noticed to the same degree in other animals. I like to think of the picture of the two old bulls helping along their comrade wounded by Major Harrison's gun; to think of several instances I have seen of a phenomenon, which I am sure is not accidental, when the young and husky elephants formed the outer ring of a group protecting the older ones from the scented danger. I like to think back to the day I saw the group of baby elephants playing with a great ball of baked dirt two and a half feet in diameter which, in their playing, they rolled for more than half a mile, and the playfulness with which this same group teased the babies of a herd of buffalo until the cow buffaloes chased them off. I think, too, of the extraordinary fact that I have never heard or seen African elephants fighting each other. They have no enemy but man and are at peace amongst themselves.
It is my friend the elephant that I hope to perpetuate in the central group in the Roosevelt African Hall as it is now planned for the American Museum of Natural History—a hall with groups of African animal skins mounted on sculptured bodies, with backgrounds painted from the country itself. In this, which we hope will be an everlasting monument to the Africa that was, the Africa that is now fast disappearing, I hope to place the elephant group on a pedestal in the centre of the hall—the rightful place for the first animal of them all.
And it may not be many years before such museum exhibits are the only remaining records of my jungle friends. As civilization advances in Africa, the extinction of the elephant is being accomplished slowly but quite as surely as that of the American buffalo two generations ago. It is probably not true that the African elephant cannot be domesticated. In fact, somewhere in the Congo is a farm where fifty tame elephants, just as amenable as those in India, are at work. But taming elephants is not a sound proposition economically. Elephant farming is a prince's game, and Africa has no princes to play it. An elephant requires hundreds of acres of land, infinitely more than cattle and sheep and the other domesticated animals. So it is that as man moves on the land, the elephant must move off.
Moreover, African settlers are making every effort to hasten the process. Wherever the elephants refuse to be confined to their bailiwicks and annoy the natives by raiding their farms, the Government has appointed official elephant killers. The South African elephant in the Addoo bush was condemned to be exterminated several years ago. Here, however, the hunters sent into the bush to kill them off found the elephant too much for them and finally gave up the attempt. Now they are being shot only as they come out to molest the natives, with the result that they are able to persist in the bush in limited numbers. Uganda also has official elephant killers wherever the elephants make trouble in the natives' gardens. In British East Africa and in Tanganyika a similar situation exists. The game must eventually disappear as the country is settled, and with it will be wiped out the charm of Africa.
We had heard much of Ruindi Plains in the Belgian Congo as the wonderful game country that it no doubt used to be. To me it seems avast graveyard. There, too, commercialism has played its part in exterminating the animals and, while we found two or three species of antelope and many lions, other large game is very rare. I suppose that the Ruindi Valley was discovered among the last of the great game pockets and that ivory poachers are responsible for the disappearance of much of the other game as well as of the elephant. The forested valley, which I went through for perhaps ten miles, carried every evidence of having been a wonderful game country in the past, but only a pitiful remnant of the splendid animals who once made it their home remains. Along great elephant boulevards, all overgrown, weaving through the forest, one may occasionally track a single elephant or a small band. A small herd of buffalo grazes where a few years ago there were great numbers.
In our journey north from Cape Town by rail we saw not a single head of game until we reached the Lualaba River, and during the five days that we spent going down that river we saw only a few antelope, perhaps a half dozen elephants and, as I remember it, two or three hippopotami. On the entire journey to within fifty miles of Lake Edward and in all our hunting we found signs of only a few small bands of elephants. Men have spoken of darkest Africa, but the dark chapters of African history are only now being written by the inroads of civilization.