Did the elephant see me?
Did he come to meet me and attack me?
LYING LOW FOR ELEPHANTS.
AN UGLY VISITOR.
Such were the questions that came at once to my mind. My courage began to quail. I was, as I said, quite alone; I had left all my men in the camp: these men were the slaves of some of my Mpongwes’ friends, and they were, I knew, fast asleep; in case of accident I had no one to come to the rescue. At that time I was a young lad, and had no confidence in myself, and to fight an elephant which looked so big, seemed to me perfectly impossible. But very soon I got accustomed to face danger, and loved to hunt elephants. I was no more afraid of them. Well, the elephant kept still coming toward me as I lay flat on the ground. At last he stopped, and then I saw him raise his trunk; my heart began to beat terribly, for I thought he was coming down to charge upon me. Then he sniffed two or three times and suddenly ran away. I had shouldered my gun, resolved at any rate to try to kill him instead of being trampled down by his huge feet.
The sound of every one of his steps could be heard distinctly, as he ran away from me, and he was soon out of sight. He had gone into the forest, and nature fell back into its accustomed stillness. Now and then the voice of a frog resounded strangely from the prairie.
Suddenly a cloud came over the moon, and it grew almost dark; the wind blew strongly, for it was in the dry season and was quite chilly. After wandering a while I came at last to a large ant-hill and sheltered myself there, thinking at the same time that it would be a splendid place to hide and look for game.
How strange my shadow appeared by the side of that ant-hill, when the moon shone again!
I did not wait long for game. I had not lain long by the ant-hill before I saw coming out of the forest not far off a herd of Bos brachicheros, the wild bull of this part of Africa. How fantastic their bodies appeared, as one by one they came out of the forest: they were coming toward where I stood, and the wind blew toward me. I counted, I think, twenty of these wild buffaloes. They stopped for a while as if to determine what direction to take, and perhaps also to see if they might discover or smell the leopard, which is their most dangerous enemy, and then continued their march toward the ant-hill where I was. I became very excited, cocked my gun, and aimed at the bull which was heading the herd, then pulled the trigger; bang! and down he came. A general stampede followed, but just in the direction of the ant-hill. What did these fellows mean? Did they all want to charge me? No, they passed to the right and left of the ant-hill. After they had passed I turned round and fired another shot into the midst of them, but this time with less effect, for none fell, and this second shot made them run away with greater speed than before. At any rate I was glad, for I had knocked down the bull, the head of the herd.