Up to this point our conduct had been that of fairly sane men; but no sooner did the big antelopes disappear, at a distance of some two hundred yards in front of us, into the dense forest, than without a thought we plunged in after them, gaining rapidly upon the hindermost, at which we had fired three shots as we rode, and which—with rare bad luck for the eland, for we were not accustomed to firing at full gallop—we had wounded.
We rode madly into the thick cover, straining every nerve to overtake our prey. We could hear them crashing their way through the trees, very close at hand, and this excited us to even greater exertion.
The result was a foregone conclusion. When, a quarter of an hour later, we succeeded in overtaking the wounded beast and administering the coup de grâce, and had admired to the full the splendid proportions of the beautiful dead animal at our feet, it struck us that we had perhaps done a rash thing in venturing into this jungle.
"I wonder where we are?" one of us remarked laughingly.
"Do you remember the way out of this place?" asked Jack of me, looking around him.
The tangled growths on every side were of such density that it was impossible to see fifty yards in any direction.
"We must follow our tracks back, I suppose," I said. "That won't be difficult, will it, as the elands crashed through the same way?"
Jack did not think it would be very difficult, neither did I. Yet, after we had ridden back for a few hundred yards we came to a place where the right way might be any one of three ways; for either our herd had dispersed at this spot, or other companies of deer or other wild animals had passed, making several trampled tracks which our inexperienced eyes could not distinguish from our own, and any one of which might, as I say, be the right one.
"This is the way, I believe," said Jack, showing one trampled path.
But I was almost sure that the right course was not this, but another. We argued; we laughed; we grew serious; we argued again; but all that we said and adduced in support of our respective contentions only tended to puzzle us both the more. In the end we were no nearer a solution of the difficulty, but rather, if possible, further away; for I believe it is a fact that we were both so muddled by the arguments, and by the general sameness of the look of the place in every direction, that we neither of us knew at last which trampled path we had selected in the first instance to swear by. I daresay I changed over to Jack's and he to mine.