After this we pushed along faster than ever, for the day was getting on. The quarry led us in every conceivable direction. Had I got lost or had my natives deserted me, I could not have found my way back to the village at all. The sun’s position did not help, it being invisible. A compass would not have helped unless a kind of rough course had been jotted down with the distances travelled between changes of direction.
A COLONY OF “CHIMPS” FRUIT-GATHERING.
SMALL ELEPHANT OF LIBERIA.
Towards evening I began to think that it was a rum go. I could see no reason why the elephant should travel so: food appeared to be plentiful. There were no signs of man anywhere. But the fact remains that their signs showed that we had gained but little on them during our nine hours’ march. We had to camp for the night.
Rain during the night obliterated the tracks to some extent and made trekking slower. We had not gone far when the unexpected happened. The natives all stopped, listening. “Only monks,” I thought. Wrong again, for it was elephant this time. They must have wandered round back on to their tracks, and we happened along just in the nick of time to hear them crossing. Had we been a few minutes earlier we should probably have had another day’s hard going for nothing.
Some of them were quite close, making all the usual sounds of feeding elephant. The sighs, the intestinal rumbles, the cracks, the r-r-r-r-ips as they stripped branches, the little short suppressed trumpet notes, the wind noises and the thuds of flapping ears—all were there.
Now, leaving the boys, I approached alone. It was astonishing how thick the stuff seemed. I was certainly very close indeed to elephant, but nothing could I see. I started through some bush, came out sure of seeing something—and did so when I lowered my eyes. I had completely forgotten my idea about these being dwarf elephants, and had been unconsciously peering about for a sight at the elevation of an ordinary elephant’s top parts; whereas here I was looking straight into the face of an elephant on a level with mine and only a matter of feet between us. At first I thought it was a calf, and was about to withdraw when I noticed a number of animals beyond the near one. All were the same height. None stood over 7 ft. at the shoulder. Their ivory was minute. I withdrew to think it over calmly. I met the headman, much too close in, and cursed him soundly. I said there was no ivory and that I was going to look for a bull among the main body, and that he had better keep well back. I was intensely annoyed at his pressing up like that and also with the appearance of the elephant. I was not so interested in the natural history point of view then as I would be now, and the fact that these elephant were as out of proportion to the ordinary elephant as the pigmy hippo is to the ordinary hippo merely irritated me.
Circling round the lot I had first seen, I got up to the bigger herd, searching vainly for a bull. I had now more leisure to examine the beasts and to compare them one with another. I soon spotted what should have been a fair herd bull, judging by the width of his forehead and the taper of his tusks, but he stood scarcely 6 ins. higher than the cows about him. His tusks were minute, but yet he had lost his baby forehead and ears, and looked, what in fact he was, a full-blown blood. I shot him. But here again I was at fault. I took a calm, deliberate shot at his brain, or rather where I thought his brain ought to be, and where it would have been in any decent elephant. But it was not there. Whether or not he was a brainless elephant I cannot positively say, for I killed him with the heart shot. But I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I subsequently found out where others of his race kept their brains, and their situation in the head was not that of an ordinary elephant’s. The ears were also different, although this is a poor distinction upon which to found a pretension to difference of race, for ears differ all over Africa. Then, the tail hairs were almost as fine as those of giraffe. As regards bulk, I should say it would take six of them to balance a big Lakka elephant.