In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

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.