Elton’s party enjoyed several days of most exciting elephant-stalking in the neighboring hills. Sallying out one morning into a part of the forest where the great brutes were known to abound, the herd was at length sighted; two or three of the elephants dozing under the shade of some trees, others engaged in munching branches, or shaking the boughs and picking up one by one with their trunks the berries that were scattered below. They were soon aroused from this delightful Elysium of rest and enjoyment by the hunters, who had crept up to within ten or fifteen yards unseen. Singling out the biggest elephant, a huge tusker, who stood blinking contemplatively under the shadow of a tree, Elton and his companion, Mr. Rhodes, each planted a bullet behind his shoulder. He trumpeted, staggered forward, tripped over into the rocky bed of a “nullah,” scrambled out on the other side, and there receiving another two shots, crashed down lifeless into a second dry water-course.
AN ELEPHANT CHARGE.
Chase was then given up a mountain gorge to the next largest elephant which deliberately charged back at Elton, the nearest of her pursuers. Allowing her to approach to within about three yards, he gave her a forehead shot, which turned her round; and then Rhodes “doubled her over like a rabbit.” The retreating herd were pursued to the top of the pass, where the last of the line, a big bull elephant, receiving a shot, stumbled and fell, while Elton, with “the pace on,” nearly fell on the top of him; “and,” he says, “holding my Henry rifle like a pistol, I shot him again at the root of the tail. The shock was irresistible; over the edge of the ravine he went, head foremost, the blood gushing out of his trunk, and his fall into space only broken by a stout acacia, in which he hung suspended, his fore and hind legs on either side—dead.” Still the hunt was continued, and on a second rocky slope a wounded elephant was found laboring up, supported and helped on by a friend on either side, while a fourth urged him on from behind with his forehead. This last faced round, and stood defiantly at bay, his ears “spread-eagled.” Elton’s last cartridge missed fire; Rhodes shot; a tremendous report followed; the elephant, with a groan, plunged over a cliff, and hung suspended by a
thorn-tree in mid-air, like his predecessor; while Mr. Rhodes, casting his gun from him, ran down the declivity to the river, his face streaming with blood; and the survivors of the herd, toiling painfully up the mountain-side, disappeared over the sky-line, “uttering loud grumblings of disapprobation and distress.” The chamber of the rifle had burst, cutting Mr. Rhodes severely in the face; and his companion endeavored to console him by telling him that many a man at home would have given one thousand pounds for such a day’s sport, and suffered the cut in the forehead into the bargain.
Such sport is, however, getting every day more difficult to obtain; for this lordly animal, the true “king of beasts,” is retreating before the march of civilization, and becoming gradually more scarce even in the African solitudes. This is not to be wondered at, considering the vast numbers—probably from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand—that are killed annually for the sake of their ivory.
It may be remarked that Elton’s escape from the elephant’s charge was a remarkably close one. There is only one other instance known of the “forehead shot” being effectual in stopping the course of an African elephant. This adventure happened in the Abyssinian highlands to Sir Samuel Baker. That mighty hunter was at the time new to African sport, and imagining that planting a bullet in the forehead, the favorite method with hunters of the wild elephant of India and Ceylon, would be equally effectual in the case of his big-eared kinsman of Central Africa, he awaited the charge of an elephant until she was within five yards of the muzzle of his rifle. The bullet happened to strike a vulnerable spot in the skull, and dropped the animal dead; but the lookers-on for several moments regarded the hunter as a dead man.
In both these cases the elephant shot was a female, which possesses in a less marked degree than the male the solid structure of skull that, along with their immense ears, convex foreheads, and greater size, distinguish the African from the Asiatic variety. When not struck in a vital spot, the elephant is remarkably tenacious of life; and Livingstone tells how he fired twelve bullets into one that had fallen into a hole, and had about a hundred native
spears sticking in him, and next morning found that the animal had scrambled out and escaped into the forest. Perhaps the most perilous experience that ever befell a white hunter when after elephants occurred to Mr. Oswell, far to the southward, on the banks of the Zouga. Chasing an elephant through a thorny thicket on horseback, he suddenly found the animal had wheeled round and was bearing straight down upon him. Attempting to turn his horse, he was thrown, face downwards, before the elephant. Twisting round, he saw the huge fore foot about to descend on his legs, parted them, and drew in his breath, expecting the other foot to be planted on his body; but saw the whole of the “under-side” of the huge creature pass over him, and rose unhurt to his feet, saved almost by miracle.
But this has carried us far away from the elephant marsh, from the borders of which Messrs. Elton, Cotterill, Rhodes, and Hoste made their ascent of the mountain barrier of Nyassa. The lowest pass over the Konde, or Livingstone range, is eight thousand eight hundred feet above sea-level; and the ascent embraces every variety of climate and scenery, from stifling tropical swamp to breezy moorlands of fern and bracken, carpeted with wild thyme, daisies, dandelions, and buttercups, like our hills at home. From the top a magnificent landscape is viewed. Elton says: “The country we have passed through is without exception the finest tract in Africa I have yet seen. Towards the east we were walled in with mountains rising to a height of from twelve to fourteen thousand feet, inclosing undulating, well-watered valleys, lovely woodland slopes, hedged-in fields, and knolls dotted with native hamlets. There is nothing to equal it either in fertility or in grazing land in Natal, the reputed ‘garden of South Africa.’ It is the most exceptionally favorable country for semi-tropical cultivation I have ever seen.”