In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

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.