“No, he went for two miles, then separated from the others, and stood in the thick bush. I becrouped (stalked him) and gave him my bullet between the eye and the ear, and he fell.”
“Where’s his tail, Hans?” said one of the Boers.
Hans drew from his pocket a second small black bristly lump, and placed it beside the first, saying, “There is the tail of the elephant in the thick bush.”
“What weight are the tusks, Hans?” said Bernhard.
“About sixty to eighty pounds each. They are old bulls with sound teeth.”
“And ivory is fetching five shillings a pound. A sixty pound business. Oh, Hans, you are lucky! Are there more there, do you think? Was there other spoor, or were these wanderers?”
“To-morrow,” replied Hans, “we may come upon a large herd of bulls, for before sundown I crossed fresh spoor of a herd of about twenty. They were tracking south, so we shall not have far to go.”
“But tell us,” said Victor, another Boer, “about the lion above there. How did you see him? It was dark, was it not?”
“Not very dark; the moon gave me light, and the creature whisked its tail just as it was going to spring, and so I saw it. I knew the place was one likely for a lion, and so had my eyes about me. It does not do to think too much when you walk in the veldt by night, or you may be taken unawares. I shot the lion between the eyes; and had he been any thing but a lion, he would have dropped dead; but a lion’s life is too big to go all at once out of so small a hole as a bullet makes, and so he did not die for ten minutes.”
“Where are the other two bull elephants, Hans?” inquired Victor. “Did they go far, do you think, or would they stop?”