In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country

by John T. McCutcheon

Colonel Roosevelt, his son Kermit, Leslie Tarlton, who is managing the Roosevelt expedition, and Edmund Heller, the taxidermist of the expedition, came to our camp on the fourteenth of November to have luncheon and to talk over plans whereby Colonel Roosevelt was to kill one or more elephants for Mr. Akeley's American museum group of five or six elephants. The details were all arranged and later in the afternoon the colonel and his party left for their own camp, only a short distance from ours.

Mr. Akeley, with one of our tents and about forty porters, followed later in the evening and spent the night at the Roosevelt camp. The following morning Colonel Roosevelt, Mr. Akeley, Mr. Tarlton and Kermit, with two tents and forty porters and gunbearers, started early in the hope of again finding the trail of the small herd of elephants that had been seen the day before. The trail was picked up after a short time and the party of hunters expected that it would be a long and wearisome pursuit, for it was evident that the elephants had become nervous and were moving steadily along without stopping to feed. In such cases they frequently travel forty or fifty miles before settling down to quiet feeding again.

The country was hilly, deep with dry grass, and badly cut up with small gullies and jagged out-croppings of rock on the low ridges. At all times the ears of the hunting party were alert for any sound that would indicate the proximity of the herd, but for several hours no trumpeting, nor intestinal rumbling, nor crash of tusks against small trees were heard. Finally, at about eleven o'clock, Tarlton, who, strangely enough, is partly deaf, heard a sound that caused the hunting party to stop short. He heard elephants. They were undoubtedly only a short distance ahead, but as the wind was from their direction there was little likelihood that they had heard the approach of the hunters. So Tarlton, who has had much experience in elephant hunting, led the party off at a right angle from the elephant trail and then, turning, paralleled the trail a few hundred feet away. They had gone only a short distance when it became evident that they had passed the herd, which was hidden by the tall grass and the thickly-growing scrub trees that grew on all sides.

The wooded character of the country rendered it easy to stalk the elephant herd, and with careful attention to the wind, the four hunters and their gunbearers advanced under cover until the elephants could be seen and studied. Each of the four hunters carried a large double-barreled cordite rifle that fires a five-hundred-grain bullet, backed up by nearly a hundred grains of cordite.

As was expected, the herd consisted solely of cows and calves. There were eight cow elephants and two totos, or calves, a circumstance that was particularly fortunate, as Colonel Roosevelt was expected to secure one or two cows for the group, while some one else was to get the calf.

For some moments the hunting party studied the group of animals and finally decided which ones were the best for the group.

Two of the largest cows and the calf of one of them were selected. It is always the desire of collectors who kill groups of animals for museums to kill the calf and the mother at the same time whenever practicable, so that neither one is left to mourn the loss of the other. It is one of the unpleasant features of group collecting that calves must be killed, but the collector justifies himself in the thought that many thousands of people will be instructed and interested in the group when it is finished.

Elephant hunting is considered by many African hunters as being the most dangerous of all hunting. When a man is wounded by an elephant he is pretty likely to die, whereas the wounds inflicted by lions are often not necessarily mortal ones. Also, in fighting a wounded lion one may sometimes take refuge in the low branches of a tree, but with a wounded elephant there is rarely time to climb high enough and quick enough to escape the frenzied animal. In elephant shooting, also, the hunter endeavors to approach within twenty or thirty yards, so that the bullets may be placed exactly where their penetration will be the most instantaneously deadly. Consequently, a badly placed bullet may merely infuriate the elephant without giving the hunter time to gain a place of safety, and thus be much worse than if the hunter had entirely missed his mark.

Among elephant hunters it is considered more dangerous to attack a cow elephant than a bull, for the cow is always ready and eager to defend its calf, hence when Colonel Roosevelt prepared to open fire on a cow elephant, accompanied by a calf, at a range of thirty yards, in a district where the highest tree was within reach of an elephant's trunk, the situation was one fraught with tense uncertainty.

Colonel Roosevelt is undoubtedly a brave man. The men who have hunted with him in Africa say that he has never shown the slightest sign of fear in all the months of big game hunting that they have done together. He "holds straight," as they say in shooting parlance, and at short range, where his eyesight is most effective, he shoots accurately.