Once it was a strange-looking animal with trunk-like snout, which stared for a moment before wrenching itself round, giving just a momentary view of its piebald body, and then rushed through the undergrowth.
"We're favoured," cried the doctor. "That was a specimen one ought to have shot."
"What for?" said Mr. Kenyon. "It would have been too big and clumsy to preserve. If you shoot, let it be something for the table."
The doctor took note of this, and he and the lads finding good opportunities, brought down several large water-fowl, which were plucked by the men not rowing for the evening meal, it having been decided that while on the trip up the river two good meals would be sufficient for each day.
Twice over Phra's sharp eyes detected large serpents in the overhanging boughs, their presence being doubtless explicable by the numbers of monkeys travelling to and fro along the edges of the jungle where it was cut by the river.
On the second occasion the doctor's gun was raised for a shot, but a sign from the old hunter stopped him.
"What is it?" he said, for Sree was pointing forward.
"Elephants, Sahib," whispered the man; and then bidding the men to row gently, so as not to make a sound, the boat glided on towards what in the distance looked like the blunt end of the river, so completely did it seem cut off by the sudden way in which it doubled back upon itself, growing wider and shallower at the same time, while from some peculiarity of soil the trees had retired farther from the bank, leaving quite a wide, park-like stretch, through which the stream meandered.
But the party in the boat had no eyes for the scenery; their attention was taken up fully, as they turned the bend of the river, by the sight of some ten or a dozen elephants of all sizes indulging in a bath in the now shallow water, wading, wallowing, or squirting it over their backs.
It was evidently such a sanctuary that the great animals felt no fear of being disturbed, and the boat and its occupants remained unnoticed, Sree having signed to the men to run it close in under the shore on the right. Here, through the doubling back of the river, they were not above a couple of hundred yards across the intervening jungle from where they had come up and the old hunter had first heard the noise made by the herd.