C. G. Schillings, phot.
WATERBUCK.
Yet it is fine to remember one’s ordinary shooting expeditions in the tropics. You need some luck, of course—the velt is illimitable and the game scattered all over it. But if the rains have just ceased, if you have secured good guides, if you yourself are equal to facing all the hardships, then indeed it is a wonderful experience. There is no doubt about it—you have to be ready for a combination of every kind of strain and exertion. You can stand it for a day perhaps, or two or three, but you must then take a rest. The man who has gone through with this may venture on the experiment of pursuing elephants for several days together. He will, I think, bear me out in saying that until you have done that also you do not know the limits of endurance and fatigue.
The most glorious hour in the African sportsman’s life is that in which he bags a bull-elephant. When he succeeds in bringing the animal down at close range in a thicket such as I have so often described, his heart beats with delight—it is just a chance in such cases what your fate may be. Wide as are the differences in the views taken by experienced travellers and by other writers in regard to African sport in general, they are all agreed that elephant-hunting is the most dangerous task a man can set himself. The hunting of Indian or Ceylon elephants—save in the case of a “rogue”—is not to be compared with the African sport as I understand it. I do not mean the easy-going, pleasure-excursion kind of hunt ordinarily gone in for in the African bush, but a one-man expedition, in which the sportsman sets himself deliberately to bag his game single-handed. That, indeed, is my idea of how one should go after big game in such countries as Africa in all circumstances whatever.
Barely as many as a dozen elephants have fallen to my rifle. Some of these I killed in order to try and get hold of a young specimen which I might bring to Europe in good condition—a desire which I have long cherished, but which has not yet been fulfilled. Others I killed so that I might present them to our museums.
There were immense numbers of other bull-elephants that I might have shot, and that are probably now roaming the velt, but that I had to spare because I was more intent upon photographing them. My photographs are, however, ample compensation to me. While, too, it is pleasant to me to reflect that I have left untouched so many elephants that came within easy range, I hope, none the less, some day to bring down a specimen adorned with a really splendid pair of tusks. This is an aspiration not often realised by African sportsmen, even when they have been hunting for half a lifetime. Elephants with tusks weighing nearly five hundred pounds, like those in our illustration, are extremely rare—even in earlier times they were met with perhaps once in a hundred years.
The hunting of an African elephant, I repeat in conclusion, is a source of the greatest delight to the sportsman, for even if he does not bag his game he is well rewarded for his pains by all the interest and excitement of the chase. But no one who has not himself gone through with it can estimate what it involves. Even with the most perfected equipment in regard to arms, it is often a matter of luck whether you kill the animal outright and on the spot.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
THE SKINNING OF AN ELEPHANT. THIS SPECIMEN IS NOW IN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, BERLIN.