“I had barely time to cock my rifle, and the barrel almost touched him as I fired. I knew it was in vain, as his trunk was raised. B. fired his right-hand barrel at the same moment without effect from the same cause. I jumped on one side and attempted to spring through the deep mud: it was of no use; the long grass entangled my feet, and in another instant I lay sprawling in the enraged elephant’s path within a foot of him. In that moment of suspense I expected to hear the crack of my own bones as his massive foot would be upon me. It was an atom of time. I heard the crack of a gun; it was B.’s last barrel. I felt a spongy weight strike my heel, and, turning quickly heels over head, I rolled a few paces and regained my feet. That last shot had floored him just as he was upon me; the end of his trunk had fallen upon my heel. Still he was not dead, but he struck at me with his trunk as I passed round his head to give him a finisher with the four-ounce rifle, which I had snatched from our solitary gun-bearer.
“My back was touching the jungle from which the rogue had just charged, and I was almost in the act of firing through the temple of the still struggling elephant when I heard a tremendous crash in the jungle behind me similar to the first, and the savage scream of an elephant. I saw the ponderous fore-leg cleave its way through the jungle directly upon me. I threw my whole weight back against the thick rattans to avoid him, and the next moment his foot was planted within an inch of mine. His lofty head was passing over me in full charge at B., who was unloaded, when, holding the four-ounce rifle perpendicularly, I fired exactly under his throat. I thought he would fall upon me and crush me, but this shot was the only chance, as B. was perfectly helpless.
“A dense cloud of smoke from the heavy charge of powder for the moment obscured everything. I had jumped out of the way the instant after firing. The elephant did not fall, but he had his death wound: the ball had severed his jugular, and the blood poured from the wound. He stopped, but, collecting his stunned energies, he still blundered forward towards B. He, however, avoided him by running to one side, and the wounded brute staggered on through the jungle. We now loaded the guns; the first rogue was quite dead, and we followed in pursuit of rogue number two.”
He had received his death wound, and was found dead in the jungle a day or two afterwards. We have no doubt a large proportion of those who take up Mr Baker’s book, will read this, and many other similar adventures which it contains, in a spirit of profound scepticism. Of course, we cannot vouch for their credibility otherwise than by saying that, from our own experience and our knowledge of the experience of others, we believe not only in the possibility, but in the probability of scenes such as those described by Mr Baker frequently occurring in a long course of elephant-shooting. When a man can show three hundred or four hundred tails adorning the walls of his room, he may fairly expect us to consider them as vouchers for his own good faith; and carpet sportsmen may laugh as they please, but they will find, if they have got the pluck to try to procure similar ornaments, that elephants don’t generally allow their tails to be cut off without fighting for them, and that the mild specimen in the Zoological Gardens is not altogether to be taken as a type of the race generally.
“I have often heard people exclaim,” says Mr Baker, “upon hearing anecdotes of elephant-hunting, ‘poor things!’
“Poor things, indeed! I should like to see the very person who thus expresses his pity going at his best pace with a savage elephant after him: give him a lawn to run upon if he likes, and see the elephant gaining a foot in every yard of the chase, fire in his eye, fury in his headlong charge; and would not the flying gentleman who lately exclaimed ‘poor thing!’ be thankful to the lucky bullet that would save him from destruction?
“There are no animals more misunderstood than elephants; they are naturally savage, wary, and revengeful, displaying as great courage when in their wild state as any animal known. The fact of their natural sagacity renders them the more dangerous as foes.”
Of course, in describing a series of rencontres, involving so much personal peril as must necessarily be the accompaniment of elephant-shooting, there is much scope for exaggeration, and the more marvellous a story really is, the more susceptible it is of colouring; so that, unless the narrator be continually on his guard, he may insensibly be drawn, by the exciting nature of the incidents he recounts, into a way of relating them which smacks so strongly of undue embellishment, that the ignorant reader is disposed to discredit those facts themselves which, had he possessed personal experience, he would not have hesitated to accept. “Often,” says Mr Baker, who anticipates such unlearned criticism, “have I pitied Gordon Cumming, when I have heard him talked of as a palpable Munchausen by men who never fired a rifle or saw a wild beast except in a cage, and still these men form the greater proportion of the readers of these works.” And we are assured by our author that he has carefully abstained from working up his scenes for the sake of effect—that, in fact, if he has erred at all, it is in under-drawing them. Now, although we would not for a moment be supposed to discredit any one of the accounts which he gives us of his adventures, we cannot do Mr Baker the injustice to agree with him in this, and we consider ourselves competent judges, although we may not have been present. In looking over the illustrations which grace the work, and which are spiritedly done, there appeared to us one fault, if fault it may be called; our author and his friends always seem to be shooting with air-guns—there is a remarkable absence of any smoke. Now, without meaning in the least to infer that Mr Baker has transferred it from the pictorial representations of those scenes of which its presence would have been the appropriate ornament to the descriptions of them, which would suffer seriously from such an addition, we only remark that he has occasionally given a handle for that sort of criticism, which we, in common with himself, so much deprecate. We wish, for instance, that his measurements of distance in moments of extreme peril had been a little more vague than they are. A striking instance of the precision with which our author calculates distance occurs in the course of one of his elephant hunts; after a long combat with a rogue, he is obliged to throw away his heavy rifle and take to his heels.
“I had about three feet start of him, and I saw with delight that the ground was as level and smooth as a lawn; there was no fear of tripping up, and away I went at the fastest pace that I ever ran either before or since, taking a look behind me to see how the chase went on. I saw the bullet-mark in his forehead, which was covered with blood; his trunk was stretched to its full length to catch me, and was now within two feet of my back: he was gaining on me, although I was running at a tremendous pace. I could not screw an inch more speed out of my legs, and I kept on, with the brute gaining upon me at every stride. He was within a foot of me, and I had not heard a shot fired, and not a soul had come to the rescue. The sudden thought struck me that my brother could not possibly overtake the elephant at the pace at which we were going, and I suddenly doubled short to my left into the open plain, and back towards the guns. The rogue overshot me. I met my brother close to his tail,” &c. &c.
We remember hearing that Major Rogers once dodged between an elephant’s legs; but Major Rogers’ presence of mind was nothing to Mr Baker’s, who could deliberately calculate his distance when at full speed, and who, joyously trotting on with an elephant’s trunk first three, and then two feet from his back, does not think it worth while to double until the distance is decreased to twelve inches. It is quite possible that the elephant’s trunk was in most unpleasant proximity to the fugitive—indeed, a sporting friend of ours once had his cap taken off by a rogue in full chase, and after all fairly outran his pursuer—so that we do not doubt that Mr Baker had an uncommonly near shave, and was excessively glad to find his brother at his pursuer’s tail; but this is just the tone of description that gives rise to doubts in the minds of those who do not happen ever to have run away from an elephant.