In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

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.