In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country

by John T. McCutcheon

With Sharp Stakes in Them

Then we marched for the mountain on our big elephant hunt. The details of those twelve days of adventuring in districts, some of which were probably never traversed before by white men, our experiences with the natives, our climb up the side of the mountain and our camp in the crater; our icy mornings, our ascent of the highest peak, and our explorations of the ancient homes of the cave-dwellers—all are part of a remarkable series of events that have nothing to do with an elephant story. In the forests we saw numberless old elephant pits, and on the grassy slopes there were mazes of elephants' trails, some so big that hundreds of elephants must have moved along them. But we saw no elephants. We scanned the hills for miles and tramped for days in ideal elephant country, but our quest was all in vain. Then our food supplies ran low, our last bullock was killed, and we hurried back to the base camp on the river, a hungry, tired band of a hundred and twenty men.

The matter of provisioning a large number of porters far from the railroad is a serious one. In addition to carrying the safari outfit, the porters must carry their posho, or cornmeal ration, and it is impossible for them to carry more than a limited number of days' rations. So the farther one gets from the base of supplies the more difficult it is to move, and a relay system must be employed. Porters must be sent back for food, often six or eight days; or else a bullock wagon must be used for that purpose. In our safari we used two wagons, drawn by thirty oxen, to supplement the porters in keeping up food supplies, and even by so doing there were times when rations ran low. In such times we would shoot game for them, either kongoni or zebra, both of which are considered great delicacies by the black man.

However, this is not telling about my memorable elephant experiences in the Guas Ngishu Plateau.

We got back to the Nzoia River on December third. On the fifteenth, after many more unsuccessful attempts to get in touch with a herd, Mr. Akeley and I resolved to try the mountain again. We thought that perhaps the elephants might have moved northward along the eastern slope, and so we thought we'd push clear up to the Turkwel River and find out beyond question. We outfitted for an eight days' march, carried only one tent and a small number of good porters. Only the absolute necessaries were taken, for we expected to move fast and hard. The first day we marched eight hours, crossed the Nzoia River, and by a curious chance at once struck a fresh trail which was diagnosed as being only a few hours old. The bark torn from trees was fresh and still moist; the leaves of the branches that had been broken off as the elephants fed along the way were still unwithered, and the flowers that had been crushed down by the great feet of the herd had lost little of their freshness and fragrance.

The trail led us first in one direction, then in another; sometimes it was a big trail that plowed through the long grass like a river, with little tributaries branching in and out where the individual members of the herd had swerved out of the main channel to feed by the way. And sometimes when all the herd were feeding, the main trail disappeared, to be replaced by a maze of lesser trails leading in all directions. But by the skilful tracking of our gunbearers the main trail would be found again some distance onward. We followed the trail for hours, and then, night coming on, we went into camp near a small stream, choked with luxuriant vegetation. Akeley thought he heard a faint squeal of an elephant far off, and while the porters made camp we went on for a mile or so to investigate. But no further sounds indicated the proximity of the herd.

Early the next morning we took up the trail again, and in less than an hour my Masai sais pointed off to a distant slope a couple of miles away, where a black line appeared. It looked like an outcropping of rock. Akeley looked at it and exclaimed, "By George, I believe he's got them!" and a moment later, after he had directed his glasses on the distant spot, he said briskly, "That's right, they're over there." And so, for the first time, after having scanned suspicious-looking spots in the landscape for weeks and always with disappointment, I saw a herd of real live elephants. To the naked eye they looked more like little shifting black beetles than anything else, but in the glasses they were plainly revealed with swaying bodies and flapping ears and swinging trunks.

In elephant hunting the first important thing to consider is the wind, for the elephant is very keen-scented and is quick to detect a breath of danger in the breeze. Fortunately we had seen them in time. If we had gone ahead a few hundred yards they would have got our wind and gone away in alarm, but this had not occurred. We could see that they were feeding quietly and without the slightest evidence of uneasiness.