The Project Gutenberg eBook, In Brightest Africa, by Carl Ethan Akeley

IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA

ON A TYPICAL ELEPHANT TRAIL IN THE FOREST

CARL E. AKELEY

IN
BRIGHTEST
AFRICA

Memorial Edition

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC

COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, BY DOUBLE-
DAY, PAGE & COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

TO
THE MEMORY
OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

"He that hath drunk of Africa's fountains, will drink again."

—Old Arab Proverb

FOREWORD

I have written this Foreword, not after reading the manuscript of the volume thoroughly, but after a quarter of a century acquaintance with the experiences, thoughts, and ideals of the author himself. This is the daybook, the diary, the narrative, the incident, and the adventure of an African sculptor and an African biographer, whose observations we hope may be preserved in imperishable form, so that when the animal life of Africa has vanished, future generations may realize in some degree the beauty and grandeur which the world has lost.

Sculptor and Biographer of the vanishing wild life of Africa—I do not feel that I can adequately and truthfully characterize Carl E. Akeley better than in these words. I have always maintained that he was a sculptor, that sculpture was his real vocation, in which taxidermy was an incidental element. The sculptor is a biographer and an historian. Without sculpture we should know far less of the vanished greatness of Greece than we do. Through sculpture Carl E. Akeley is recording the vanishing greatness of the natural world of Africa. We palæontologists alone realize that in Africa the remnants of all the royal families of the Age of Mammals are making their last stand, that their backs are up against the pitiless wall of what we call civilization. Human rights are triumphing over animal rights, and it would be hard to determine which rights are really superior or most worthy to survive.

Akeley came twenty-seven years ago into the midst of this unequal contest between the flesh and blood of the animal kingdom and the steel and lead of the sportsman, of the food and ivory hunter, and his sympathies were all on the animal side in the fight. If his sympathies had been on the human side he could not be the biographer of the African vanishing world who speaks in the pages of this volume, lost in admiration of the majesty of the elephant, the unchallenged reign of the lion, the beauty and grace of the antelope, the undaunted courage of the buffalo, and, last but not least, of certain splendid qualities in the native African hunter. We know of only one other sculptor who has immortalized the African Negro in bronze; this is Herbert Ward, whose splendid life work is now in the United States National Museum.

Similarly, Carl E. Akeley's life work will be assembled in the African and Roosevelt Halls of the American Museum, in human bronzes, in a great group of the elephant, in rhinoceroses and gorillas, each group representing his unerring portrayal of the character of the animal and his sympathetic admiration of its finest qualities. It is in making close observations for these groups that he has lived so long in Africa and come very close to death on three occasions. We may find something base in animal nature if we seek it; we may also find much that is excellent and worthy of emulation. In this respect animal nature is like human nature—we may take our choice. The decadent sculptor and the decadent writer may choose the wrong side in human nature, and the sensational writer may choose the wrong side in animal nature; Akeley has chosen the ennobling side and does not dwell on the vices either of the animals or of the natives but on their virtues, their courage, defence of their young, devotion to the safety of their families—simple, homely virtues which are so much needed to-day in our civilization.

Truthfulness is the high note of the enduring biographer of animal life as well as of human life. "Set down naught in malice, nothing extenuate" is an essential principle in the portrayal of vanishing Africa as it is in our portrayal of the contemporary manners and customs of modern society; to know the elephant, the lion, the antelope, the gorilla as they really are, not as they have been pictured by sensational writers who have never seen them at close range or who have been tempted to exaggerate their danger for commercial reasons. Akeley's work on the gorilla is the latest and perhaps his best portrayal of animal life in Africa as it really is. He defends the reputation of this animal, which has been misrepresented in narrative and fiction as a ferocious biped that attacks man at every opportunity, abducts native women as in the sculptures of Fremiet, a monster with all the vices of man and none of the virtues. For this untruthful picture Akeley substitutes a real gorilla, chiefly a quadruped in locomotion, not seeking combat with man, ferocious only when his family rights are invaded, benign rather than malignant in countenance. Thus he explodes the age-long gorilla myth and we learn for the first time the place in nature of this great anthropoid and come to believe that it should be conserved and protected rather than eliminated. In other words, the author shows that there are good grounds for the international movement to conserve the few remaining tribes of the gorilla.

Akeley has come into closest touch with all these animals in turn, even at great personal risk, always leaving with increased rather than diminished admiration for them. This quality of truthfulness, combined with his love of beauty of the animal form—beauty of hide, of muscle, of bone, of facial expressions—will give permanence to Akeley's work, and permanence will be the sure test of its greatness.

Henry Fairfield Osborn.

July 27, 1923.
American Museum.

CONTENTS

LIST OF LINE DRAWINGS

IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA

IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA

CHAPTER I A NEW ART BEGUN

As a boy I lived on a farm near Clarendon, Orleans County, N. Y., and for some reason, about the time I was thirteen, I got interested in birds. I was out of place on the farm for I was much more interested in taxidermy than in farming. As a matter of fact, by the time I was sixteen I announced to the world that I was a taxidermist. I had borrowed a book which had originally cost a dollar, and from that book I learned taxidermy up to a point where I felt justified in having business cards printed stating that I did artistic taxidermy in all its branches. I even went so far as to take several lessons in painting from a lady who taught art in Clarendon, in order that I might paint realistic backgrounds behind the birds that I mounted. So far as I know, that was the first experiment of painted backgrounds used for mounted birds or animals. I believe that my first attempt in this direction is still in existence in Clarendon but I have been a little afraid to go to see it.

In the fall of the year in which I was nineteen, after the crops were in, I set out to get a wider field for my efforts. There was at that time in the neighbouring town of Brockport an Englishman named David Bruce, whose hobby was taxidermy. By calling he was a painter and interior decorator—a very skilful craftsman who did special work far and wide through the country. As a recreation he mounted birds and animals for sportsmen. His office was filled with birds in cases and he was surrounded with other evidences of his hobby.

To me it seemed that he led an ideal life, for he had a successful business and one that gave him enough spare time to indulge his fancies in taxidermy. It hadn't entered my head at the time that a man could make a living at anything as fascinating as taxidermy, so I felt that the best possible solution of the problem was that which Mr. Bruce had devised. I went to see if I could get a job with him in his decorating business in order that I might also be with him in his hobby. He was most kindly and cordial. I remember that he took me out and bought me an oyster stew and told me, while we were eating, that if I came with him he would teach me all his trade secrets in painting and decorating, which he had kept even from his workmen. It seemed to me that a glorious future was settled for me then and there. If I was not in the seventh heaven, I was at least in the fifth or sixth and going up, and then my prospects became so favourable as to become almost terrifying. Mr. Bruce, after having made me such alluring offers to come with him, said that he thought I ought to go to a much better place than his shop—a place where I might actually make a living at taxidermy. In Rochester there was a famous institution, Ward's Natural Science Establishment. At that time, and for years afterward, this establishment supplied the best museums in this country with nearly all their mounted specimens and also most of their other natural history collections. Professor Ward was the greatest authority on taxidermy of his day. It was to this place that Bruce suggested I should go. The step which he planned seemed a great venture to me, but I determined to try it. I went home from Brockport and told the family what Bruce had said and what I intended to do. I got up early next morning—I didn't have to wake up for I had hardly slept a wink—and walked three miles to the station to take the train to Rochester. When I reached there, I walked all over town before I found Ward's Natural Science Establishment and the more I walked the lower and lower my courage sank. The Establishment consisted of Professor Ward's house and several other buildings, the entrance to the place being an arch made of the jaws of a sperm whale. An apprentice approaching the studio of a Rembrandt or a Van Dyke couldn't have been more in awe than I was. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the Professor's house for a while until I finally gathered courage to ring the door-bell. I was admitted to an elaborately furnished room, and after a little while Professor Ward came in. It had been a long time since I had had breakfast, but he hadn't quite finished his, and this contrast seemed to increase my disadvantages in his presence. Moreover, Professor Ward was always very busy and very brusque and was a very fierce man. Not even when a leopard sprang on me in Africa have I had a worse moment than when this little man snapped out, "What do you want?"

The last vestige of my pride and assurance was centred on my business card, and without a word I handed him this evidence of my skill and art as a taxidermist. The card seemed to justify my belief in it, for the great man asked me when I could go to work and offered me the munificent sum of $3.50 a week. I discovered a boarding house where I could get a room and my meals for $4 a week and on this basis I began to learn the art of taxidermy and to run through my slender resources.

The art of taxidermy as practised at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in those days was very simple. To stuff a deer, for example, we treated the skin with salt, alum, and arsenical soap. Then the bones were wired and wrapped and put in his legs and he was hung, upside down, and the body stuffed with straw until it would hold no more If then we wished to thin the body at any point, we sewed through it with a long needle and drew it in. Now to do this, no knowledge of the animal's anatomy or of anything else about it was necessary. There was but little attempt to put the animals in natural attitudes; no attempt at grouping, and no accessories in the shape of trees or other surroundings. The profession I had chosen as the most satisfying and stimulating to a man's soul turned out at that time to have very little science and no art at all.

The reason for this was not so much that no one knew better. It was more the fact that no one would pay for better work. Professor Ward had to set a price on his work that the museums would pay, and at that time most museums were interested almost exclusively in the collection of purely scientific data and cared little for exhibitions that would appeal to the public. They preferred collections of birds' skins to bird groups, and collections of mammal data and skeletons to mammal groups. The museums then had no taxidermists of their own.

However, many of the prominent museum men of to-day had their early training at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Soon after I went to Ward's another nineteen-year-old boy named William Morton Wheeler, now of the Bussey Institution at Harvard, turned up there. E. N. Gueret, now in charge of the Division of Osteology in the Field Museum of Natural History, George K. Cherrie, the South American explorer; the late J. William Critchley, who became the chief taxidermist in the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences; Henry L. Ward, director of the Kent Scientific Museum in Grand Rapids; H. C. Denslow, an artist formerly associated with several of the leading museums as bird taxidermist; William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoölogical Park, and Frederick S. Webster, who was the first president of the Society of American Taxidermists, were all among the friends I made in those early days. A long list of others, not my contemporaries at that institution, but men with whom I have since been associated in museum work, might be added. Dr. Frederic A. Lucas had left Ward's shortly before my arrival to take up his duties at the Smithsonian Institution but I came to feel that I knew him very well through the stories and reminiscences of my companions. It was not until my return from my third expedition in 1911 that my delightful association with him as the director of the American Museum of Natural History was begun.

I have a theory that the first museum taxidermist came into existence in about this way: One of our dear old friends, some old-fashioned closet naturalist who knew animals only as dried skins and had been getting funds from some kind-hearted philanthropist, one day, under pressure from the philanthropist, who wanted something on exhibition to show his friends, sent around the corner and called in an upholsterer and said, "Here is the skin of an animal. Stuff this thing and make it look like a live animal." The upholsterer did it and kept on doing it until the scientist had a little more money. Given more work the upholsterer became ambitious and had an idea that these animals might be improved upon, so he began to do better work. But it took more time and cost more money so that he lost his job. Thus it has been that from the very people from whom we expected the most encouragement in the beginning of our efforts, we received the least.

I remember very well one time when an opportunity came to do something a little better. A zebra was brought into the Establishment. I had been studying anatomy and I had learned the names of all the muscles and all the bones. When I saw the zebra I realized that here was an opportunity to do something good and I asked to make a plaster cast of the body. I had to do it in my own time and worked from supper until breakfast time, following out a few special experiments of my own in the process. Nevertheless, the zebra was handed out to be mounted in the old way and my casts were thrown on the dump.

I stayed at this leading institution of taxidermy for four years and while I was there we stuffed animals for most of the museums in the country, for hunters and sportsmen, and various other kinds of people, including Barnum's circus. The animal we stuffed for Barnum's circus was the famous elephant Jumbo. We had to use a slightly different method for Jumbo, not only because of his size but because he had to be made rigid and strong enough to stand being carted around the country with the circus; for this old elephant served dead as well as alive to amuse and instruct the public. As a matter of fact, he is still at it, for his skin on the steel-and-wood frame we made for it at Ward's is at Tufts College and his skeleton is at the American Museum of Natural History.

Between the time that I first went to Ward's and my last job there, which was on Jumbo, there was an intermission which I spent in the taxidermy shop of John Wallace on North William Street in New York. I roomed in Brooklyn with Doctor Funk, of Funk & Wagnalls, and worked in the basement shop of Wallace's, and a more dreary six months I never had spent anywhere. So when Ward came after me to go back, saying that his having fired me was all a mistake due to erroneous reports that had been given him, I went, and stayed three years. During this time I got to know Professor Webster of Rochester University, who later became president of Union College, and he urged me to study to become a professor. In spite of the fact that my education had stopped early on account of a lack of funds, I set to work to prepare myself to go to the Sheffield Scientific School. But between working in the daytime and studying at night I broke down, and when examination time came I wasn't ready. However, my chances of further education, although delayed, seemed improved. At the time I was studying for the Sheffield Scientific School my friend, William Morton Wheeler, had left Ward's and was teaching in the High School in Milwaukee. He wrote and offered to tutor me if I would go out there. So I went to Milwaukee and got a job with the museum there, which was to give me food and lodging while I prepared for college. It did more than that, for it absorbed me so that I gave up all thought of abandoning taxidermy. I stayed eight years in Milwaukee, working in the museum and in a shop of my own.

Several things happened there which stimulated my interest in taxidermy. One of the directors had been to Lapland and had collected the skin of a reindeer, a Laplander's sled, and the driving paraphernalia, and he was anxious to have these shown in the museum. This material we turned into a group of a Laplander driving a reindeer over the snow. That was fairly successful, and we induced the museum to buy a set of skins of orang-outangs, which Charles F. Adams, another of my former colleagues at Ward's, had collected in Borneo. We arranged them in a group using some bare branches as accessories.

In making these groups we had had to abandon the old straw-rag-and-bone method of stuffing and create modelled manikins over which to stretch the skins. As soon as this point was reached several problems presented themselves, the solution of which meant an entirely new era in taxidermy. If a man was going to model a realistic manikin for an animal's skin, instead of stuffing the skin with straw, it was evident he would have to learn to model. Likewise it turned out that, even if a man knew how to model, he couldn't model an animal body sufficiently well for the skin to fit it unless he knew animal anatomy. And we found out also that making a manikin from a model was not as simple as it sounds, but that on the contrary it is about as difficult as casting in bronze, the difference being that the art of bronze casting has been developed through many years, while the art of making manikins had to be created comparatively quickly and by a very few people. We worked at these problems step by step in Milwaukee and made a good deal of progress.

The reindeer and orang-outang work encouraged me to suggest a series of groups of the fur-bearing animals of Wisconsin, the muskrat group to be the first of the series. This suggestion was more tolerated than encouraged when it was first made, but I went as far as I could go with my dream and before I left there I finished the muskrat group, as I did most of my early experiments, in spite of the opposition of the authorities. It was the old, old story of starting a thing and having to give it up because of lack of support. But my idea won eventually. It was only a short time until my friend Wheeler was made director of the museum and from then on there was full sympathy for the plan. This was an entering wedge, and since that time group after group has been added, until now that museum has a magnificent series.

Wheeler, who had encouraged me to go to Milwaukee, also was the cause of my leaving. One year, while he was director, he went to Europe, and while abroad had a talk with Sir William Flower of the British Museum, in which Flower intimated that he would like me to go there. So I planned to quit Milwaukee and to go to London. However, I didn't immediately get any farther than Chicago. I stopped there and happened to go into the Field Museum of Natural History. It was then housed in the old art gallery of the Columbian Exposition. Professor Daniel G. Eliot was its curator of zoölogy. He offered me some taxidermy contracts on the spot and I accepted. While I was doing them he suggested that I go with him on an expedition to Africa. We started in 1896.

When we got back from that trip I continued at the Field Museum as chief of the Department of Taxidermy. Before leaving Milwaukee I had been working on an idea of four deer groups, to be called the "Four Seasons," to show the animals in natural surroundings of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. I collected a good deal of the necessary material and put a lot of work on the project in my own shop, and finally reached a point where it became necessary for me to know whether the museum was going to want the groups or not. I approached the curator of zoölogy. He said that he would recommend the purchase of one of the four. Later I saw the president of the museum. After some discussion he asked why it was that the museum couldn't have the four groups. I gave him every assurance that it could. I spent four years on these four groups. It wouldn't take so long now but at that time we had not only to make the groups but also to perfect the methods of doing it at the same time. Four years is a long time to take on four deer groups, but the number of things in taxidermy we worked out in doing those groups made it a very full four years' work. In fact, the method finally used for mounting those deer groups is the method still in use.

Briefly, that method is this: For each animal a rough armature was made, on which a life-sized clay model was shaped just like a clay model made for casting in bronze except that to facilitate accuracy the skull and leg bones of the animal were used. This model was checked by measurements made of the dead animal in the field, by photographs, and frequently by anatomical casts made in the field. The final result was a model not only of the species but of the actual animal whose skin we were going to use. All this took a lot of time, study, and money, and it was quite a different thing from stuffing a skin with rags and straw. For a temporary effect the skin could be mounted on the clay model, but an animal so mounted would deteriorate. For permanent work it was necessary to devise some light, durable substance, which would not be affected by moisture, to take the place of the clay of the manikin. After a lot of experimentation I came to the conclusion that a papier-mâché manikin reënforced by wire cloth and coated with shellac would be tough, strong, durable, and impervious to moisture. It isn't possible to model papier-mâché with the hands as one moulds clay, so the problem resolved itself into making a plaster mould of the clay model and then using that to build the papier-mâché manikin. When a man wishes to make a bronze in a mould he can pour the melted metal into the mould and when it has cooled remove the mould. But you can't pour papier-mâché reënforced with wire cloth and if you put it into a plaster-of-paris mould it will stick. The solution of this difficulty struck me suddenly one day when I was riding into town to go to the museum.

"I've got it!" I exclaimed, to the amusement of my friends and the rest of the car full of people. As soon as I could get to my shop I tried it and it worked. It was to take the plaster moulds of the clay model and coat the inside of them with glue. On this glue I laid a sheet of muslin and worked it carefully and painstakingly into every undulation of the mould. On this went thin layers of papier-mâché with the wire cloth reënforcement likewise worked carefully into every undulation of the mould. Every layer of the papier-mâché composition was carefully covered with a coating of shellac so that each layer, as well as the whole, was entirely impervious to water. For animals the size of a deer two layers of reënforced composition give strength enough. For animals the size of an elephant four are sufficient and four layers are only about an eighth of an inch thick. When the final coat of shellac was well dried I immersed the whole thing in water. The water affected nothing but the thin coating of glue between the mould and the muslin. That melted and my muslin-covered, reënforced papier-mâché sections of the manikin came out of the plaster mould clean and perfect replicas of the original clay model. The four sections of the manikin were assembled with the necessary leg irons and wooden ribs and the whole was ready for the skin.

The combination of glue and muslin was the key to the whole problem. The manikin so made is an absolutely accurate reproduction of the clay model, even more accurate than bronze castings for there is no shrinkage. The manikin of a deer so constructed weighs less than thirty pounds, but it is strong enough to hold a man's weight. I have sat on the back of an antelope mounted in this manner and done it no harm. Moreover, it is entirely made of clean and durable materials. There is nothing to rot or shrink or to cause shrinkage or decay in the skin. Of the animal itself only the shells of the hoofs and horns, and the skin are used, and the skin is much more carefully cleaned and tanned than those of women's furs. An animal prepared in this way will last indefinitely. This was a long step from the methods we used at Ward's of filling a raw skin with greasy bones of the legs and skull and stuffing the body out with straw, excelsior, old rags, and the like.

I believe that there has not yet been devised a better method of taxidermy than that described here and its use has become almost universal. Although it does not take much time to tell about it, the mounting of an animal in this way is a long and tedious process. Moreover, it is hard work. Consequently, but few of the people using it do a thoroughly constructed manikin. In an attempt to save time and money cheaper processes are resorted to and many animals, mounted by methods that only approximate that which I have evolved, fail to show good results. When the method was first introduced at the American Museum of Natural History, the authorities objected to its expense, and to cut down the cost a light plaster cast, believed to be "just as good," was substituted for the manikin. Many specimens mounted in this manner have since been thrown on the dump heap.

I finally got the four deer groups finished and the Field Museum bought them at the price agreed upon. When I figured it out financially I found that I had come out even on my expenditures for labour and materials but for my own time and for profit there was nothing. However, I had the experience and the method and I felt that it was a pretty good four years' work.

In the old days at Ward's a taxidermist was a man who took an animal's skin from a hunter or collector and stuffed it or upholstered it. By the time I had finished the deer groups I had become pretty well convinced that a real taxidermist needed to know the technique of several quite different things.

First, he must be a field man who can collect his own specimens, for other people's measurements are never very satisfactory, and actual study of the animals in their own environment is necessary in making natural groups.

Second, he must know both animal anatomy and clay modelling in order to make his models.

Third, he should have something of the artistic sense to make his groups pleasing as well as accurate.

Fourth, he must know the technique of manikin making, the tanning of skins, and the making of accessories such as artificial leaves, branches, etc.

With all these different kinds of technique in taxidermy it is obvious that if a man attempts to do practically everything himself, as I did in the deer groups, taxidermy must be a very slow process—just as if a painter had to learn to make his own paint or a sculptor to cast his own bronzes or chisel his concepts out of granite or marble.

The proper care of the skins in the field is itself a subject of infinite ramifications. I remember, for instance, my experience in skinning the first elephant that I killed. I shot him in the early afternoon. I immediately set to work photographing and measuring him. That took about an hour, and then I set to the serious work of getting off his skin. I worked as rapidly as I could, wherever possible using the help of the fifty boys of my safari, and by strenuous efforts finished taking the skin off and salting it by breakfast time the next morning. And that was not quick enough. Before I got all the skin off the carcass some of it on the under side had begun to decompose and I lost a little of it. This was a particularly difficult beast to skin because he had fallen in a little hollow and after skinning the exposed side of him all the efforts of the fifty black boys to roll him over, out of the depression, so that we could easily get at the other side, failed. After I had had more practice, I was able to photograph, measure, and skin an elephant and have his hide salted in eight hours. But then the work on the skin was only begun. A green skin like this weighs a ton and a quarter and in places is as much as two and a half inches thick. There is about four days' work in thinning it. I have had thirty or forty black boys for days cutting at the inside of the skin in this thinning process or sharpening the knives with which they did the work.

When it is finally thinned down, thoroughly dried and salted, it presents another problem. Moisture will ruin it. Salt, the only available preservative, attracts moisture. It isn't possible to carry zinc-lined cases into the forests after elephants. I tried building thatched roofs over the skins but it was not a success. I speculated on many other plans but none appeared feasible. Finally Nature provided a solution for the difficulty.

There are, in the elephant country, many great swarms of bees. I set the natives to work collecting beeswax which is as impervious to moisture as shellac. I melted the wax and used it to coat unbleached cotton cloth, known in East Africa as Americana. In this water-tight, wax-covered cloth I wrapped my dried and salted rolls of skins and packed them on the porters' heads down to the railroad.

As a matter of fact, field conditions make it so difficult to care for skins properly that only a very small percentage ever reach a taxidermy shop in perfect condition.

Similarly the measurement of animals for taxidermy presents many difficulties. The size of a lion's leg, for instance, measured as it hangs limp after the animal's death is not accurate data for the leg with the muscles taut ready for action. Nor is an animal's body the same size with its lungs deflated in death as when the breath of life was in its body. All these things must be taken into account in using measurements or even casts to resurrect an animal true to its living appearance.

My work on the deer groups impressed me with the fact that taxidermy, if it was to be an art, must have skilled assistance as the other arts have. I began to dream of museums which would have artist-naturalists who would have the vision to plan groups and the skill to model them and who would be furnished with skilled assistance in the making of the manikins and accessories and in the mounting of the animals. And it seemed as if the dream were about to come true. About this time I had a conference with Dr. Herman Bumpus, then director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He told me that he had then at the museum a young man named James Clark who could model but who did not know the technique of making manikins and mounting animals. The result of our talk was that Clark came out to my shop in Chicago and together we went through the whole process, mounting a doe which now stands in the American Museum. But the old museum trouble broke out again. It cost a lot to mount animals in the method which Clark brought back. So there was pressure to reduce the cost and, under this pressure, the methods, in the words of O. Henry, "were damaged by improvements." However, in the course of time it was demonstrated that while it often happens that an honest effort to make a thing better often makes it cheaper also, an effort merely to cheapen a thing very seldom makes it better.

In the meanwhile, in 1905, I went to Africa again, to collect zoölogical material for the Field Museum.

Again, in 1909, I went, this time for the American Museum of Natural History. I stayed two years, studying elephants, lions, and lion spearing. When I got back and set to work mounting the elephant group in the American Museum in New York, I discovered that with these hairless skins there was opportunity for a little simplification of the method used in the deer groups. It was possible actually to model the skin on the clay manikin, only in this case the clay manikin was for convenience in three pieces. A layer of plaster of paris was then laid on outside the skin to hold it firmly in shape. Then the clay removed from the inside was replaced with a layer of plaster. Thus every detail of the skin was held firmly in the matrix of plaster until it was thoroughly dried, when the plaster was removed from the inside and replaced with succeeding layers of wire cloth and shellaced papier-mâché, making the skin an integral part of the manikin. In other words, the skin functioned practically as does the muslin in the manikins made for haired animals. When this was done the plaster mould was taken off the outside and the clean, light, durable half-sections of elephants were put together.

When I got back from Africa in 1911 I was dreaming of a great African Hall which would combine all the advances that had been made in taxidermy and the arts of museum exhibition and at the same time would make a permanent record of the fast-disappearing wild life of that most interesting animal kingdom, Africa.

CHAPTER II ELEPHANT FRIENDS AND FOES

I have sat in the top of a tree in the middle of a herd a quarter of a mile from a native village in Uganda in a last desperate effort to inspect the two hundred and fifty elephants which had been chevying me about so fast that I had not had a chance to see whether there were any desirable specimens among them or not. I have spent a day and a night in the Budongo Forest in the middle of a herd of seven hundred elephants. I have stood on an ant-hill awaiting the rush of eleven elephants which had got my wind and were determined to get me. I have spent a day following and fighting an old bull which took twenty-five shots of our elephant rifles before he succumbed. And once also I had such close contact with an old bull up on the slopes of Mt. Kenia that I had to save myself from being gored by grabbing his tusks with my hands and swinging in between them.

I have spent many months studying elephants in Africa—on the plains, in the forests, in the bamboo, up on the mountains. I have watched them in herds and singly, studied their paths, their feeding grounds, everything about them I could, and I have come to the conclusion that of all the wild animals on this earth now, the African elephant is the most fascinating, and that man, for all the thousands of years he has known of elephants, knows mighty little about him. I am speaking only of the African elephant. He has not been domesticated as his Indian cousin has. The two are different in size and different in shape and different in habits. The low point of an African elephant's back line is the highest point of that of the Indian elephant. The African elephant's ears and tusks are larger, and his tusks usually spread wider at the points instead of coming together. Unless one studies him in his native haunts, one cannot get to know him. His disposition is held to be wilder than that of the Indian elephant, but the infrequency of his appearance in circuses and in zoölogical parks may be attributed to the ease with which tamed elephants may be obtained from India rather than to a difference of temper in the two beasts. An African elephant at Washington and one in the Bronx zoölogical park are the only ones I know of in this country, and no animal in captivity can give one more than a slight idea of his natural habits in his jungle home.

Very few people have studied African elephants in the field. Ninety-five per cent. of those who have followed them have been purely hunters and their desire has been, not to study, but to shoot—to see the elephant the shortest possible time. Time to judge the ivories and get a bead on the brain was all that they wanted. Of other elephant knowledge all that they needed was the simple facts of how to follow and find them. The comparatively few men who have tried to study the elephant have not gained as much knowledge as one would imagine, because without trying it one cannot realize how extremely difficult it is to study the live African elephant.

For example, as I said before, I spent a day with seven hundred elephants in the Budongo Forest, but although I heard them all the time and was very acutely conscious that they were near me, I do not believe that I actually had my eyes on an elephant more than half an hour, all told, during the day. It happened this way.

One night about dark, after a week or two of hunting, we heard the squeal of an elephant while we were sitting at dinner. A little later there were more squeals and occasional trumpeting—more and more, clearer and clearer—and by the time we had finished dinner the noise was only a mile or so away. It was a continuous row which suggested a tremendous herd. We went to bed early with elephants getting closer to camp all of the time. There is little danger of elephants attacking a camp, and, as there is no way to study them at night, about the only thing left to do was to go to bed and get in good shape for the next day. Along about midnight Mrs. Akeley came over to my tent and said that she had loaded my guns and that they were all ready. She could not sleep; so she went out to sit by the fire. The elephants were then within a hundred yards of our tents and there was a continuous roar made up of trumpetings, squealing, and the crashing of bushes and trees.

A BIG SPECIMEN IN THE FIELD

To photograph, measure, and skin an animal the size of this one requires eight or ten hours of work
even with the assistance of forty or fifty negro boys

MR. AKELEY'S SAFARI LADEN WITH ELEPHANT SKINS

I got up in the morning and had breakfast before daybreak. The elephants had moved on down the edge of the forest. What had been a jungle of high grass and bush the day before was trampled flat. There were at least seven hundred elephants in the herd—government officials had counted them on the previous day as they came down. I followed the trails to the edge of the forest but saw none. I started back to cross a little nullah (a dry water course), but felt suspicious and decided to look the situation over a little more closely. I ran up on a sloping rock and, almost under me on the other side, I saw the back of a large elephant. Over to one side there was another one, beyond that another, and then I realized that the little nullah through which I had planned to pass was very well sprinkled with them. I backed off and went up to a higher rock to one side. Elephants were drifting into the forest from all directions. The sun was just coming up over the hills and was shining upon the forest, which sparkled in the sunlight—morning greetings to the forest people. The monkeys greeted one another with barks and coughs. Everything was waking up—it was a busy day. There was not a breath of air. I had gone back a million years; the birds were calling back and forth, the monkeys were calling to one another, a troop of chimpanzees in the open screamed, and their shouts were answered from another group inside the forest. All the forest life was awake and moving about as that huge herd of elephants, singly and in groups, flowed into the forest from the plain. There was one continuous roar of noise, all the wild life joining, but above it all were the crashing of trees and the squealing of the elephants as they moved into the forest on a front at least a mile wide. It was the biggest show I ever saw in Africa.

Then an old cow just at the edge of the forest suddenly got my wind, and wheeling about, she let out a scream. Instantly every sound ceased, everything was quiet. The monkeys, the birds—all the wild life—stopped their racket; the elephants stood still, listening and waiting. For a moment I was dazed. The thought came through my mind—"What does it all mean? Have I been dreaming?" But soon I heard the rustling of the trees as though a great storm were coming. There was no movement of the air, but there was the sound of a wind storm going through a forest. It gradually died away, and I realized that the elephants had made it as they moved off. It was the rustling of the dry leaves on the ground under their feet and the rubbing of their bodies through the dried foliage of the forest. I never heard a noise like that made by elephants—before or since. The conditions were unique, for everything was thoroughly parched, and there had not even been a dew. Ordinarily, if there is any moisture, elephants when warned can travel through a forest without the slightest noise. In spite of their great bulk they are as silent and sometimes as hard to see in their country as a jack rabbit is in his. I remember on one occasion being so close to an old cow in the jungle that I could hear the rumbling of her stomach, and yet when she realized my presence the rumbling ceased, as it always does when they are suspicious, and she left the clump of growth she was in without my hearing a sound.

But going back to the big herd. From the time I had seen the first elephant until the last of them disappeared in the forest it had been perhaps fifteen minutes—fifteen minutes in which to see the sight of a lifetime, a thing to go to Africa a dozen times to get one glimpse of. But what did I learn about the habits of the elephant in that fifteen minutes? A little perhaps but not much. It takes a long time and much patience to get at all intimate with old Tembo, as the Swahilis call him, on his native soil.

After the herd disappeared in the forest I watched for ten or fifteen minutes and heard the squeal of the elephants and the noise of the monkeys again. Their suspicions were over. I followed into the forest where the trails showed me that they had broken up into small bands. I followed along on the trail of one of these bands until I got a glimpse of an elephant about fifty yards ahead of me in the trail. You don't see a whole elephant in the forest. What you do see is just a glimpse of hide or tusk or trunk through the trees. And if you want to get this glimpse without disturbing him you must do your glimpsing from down the wind.

There was a little open space ahead of the group I was following. I worked around until I got to a place where I could see them as they passed through this open space. They were moving along slowly, feeding. Two or three came out into the opening, then they became suspicious and wheeled into the forest again. I followed cautiously. I had gone only a short distance when I saw a very young calf about twenty yards ahead of me. As I halted, the mother came trotting back down the trail looking for the baby. I froze to the side of a tree with my gun ready. She came to the baby and turning, boosted it along with her trunk after the rest of the herd. I followed along after them into an opening where I found them rounded up in a patch of burned-over ground. They were milling around in a rather compact mass seemingly preparing for defence. I could not see very plainly, for a cloud of dust rose from the burned ground as they shuffled about. I stood watching them a little time and suddenly caught sight of a fine tusk—an old bull and just what I wanted for the group I was working on for the Museum of Natural History. I ran up behind a bush at the edge of the clearing and peeked through it. There, not more than twenty yards from me, was my bull, partially exposed and partially covered by the other animals. I could not get a shot at his brain as he was standing, but the foreleg on my side was forward exposing his side so that I had a good shot at his heart—a shot I had never made before. The heart is eighteen or twenty inches long and perhaps a foot up and down—a good mark in size if one's guess at its location is accurate. If you can hit an elephant's vertebræ and break his back you can kill him. You can kill him by hitting his heart, or by hitting his brain. If you hit him anywhere else you are not likely to hurt him much and the brain and heart shots are the only safe bets. I fired at his heart with both barrels and then grabbed my other gun from the gun boy, ready for their rush, but the whole herd, including the old bull, made off in the other direction, raising a cloud of dust. I ran around and climbed an ant-hill four or five feet high to keep them in sight.

When I caught sight of them they had gone about fifty yards and had stopped. And then I did learn something about elephants. My old bull was down on the ground on his side. Around him were ten or twelve other elephants trying desperately with their trunks and tusks to get him on his feet again. They were doing their best to rescue their wounded comrade. They moved his great bulk fifteen or twenty feet in their efforts, but were unable to get him up. I don't know of any other big animals that will do this. I had heard stories that elephants had the chivalry to stick by their wounded and help them, but I was never sure myself until I had actually seen this instance. Some time later Major Harrison, a very experienced elephant hunter and a keen observer, told me of an even more remarkable instance that he had seen. He was shooting in the Congo and came upon four big bulls. One he killed and another he wounded. The wounded one went down but the two survivors helped him regain his feet, and with one on each side helping him the three moved off. Although Major Harrison followed the rest of the day he was not able to catch up with them.

I did not see the end of their efforts to raise the bull I had shot, for those that were not helping him began to circle about with their ears out to hear anything of their enemy and with their trunks up feeling for my wind. They were moving in ever-increasing circles which threatened to envelop my ant-hill, and I beat a hasty retreat. Not long after they evidently were convinced that the bull was dead and all together they moved away. I then went to the body. He was dead, but as we approached there was a reflex action which twitched his trunk from time to time. This frightened the gun boys so that I went up and slapped the elephant's eye, the customary test, and as there was no reaction the boys were convinced. When I looked the carcass over I was disappointed to find that only one of his tusks was big and well developed. The other was smaller, and out of shape from an injury; consequently I decided not to take him for the museum group. He was, however, a good deal of a temptation, for he was one of the largest elephants I had ever seen, measuring eleven feet four inches to the top of his shoulders, and the circumference of his front foot was sixty-seven and a half inches. To the best of my knowledge this is a record size by about four inches. I did not even skin him but contented myself with taking his tusks, which I sold for nearly $500 without even going down to Nairobi.

The phenomenon of elephants helping each other when wounded is not general by any means. Only a few days after shooting the big bull I had an instance of elephants abandoning one of their number that was wounded and not very badly wounded, either.

I had gone into the forest again, and had come upon another bunch in very thick country. I could only get little glimpses of a patch of hide or ivory once in a while. After working along with them for a while in the hope of getting into more open ground I tried the experiment of beating on the tree trunks with sticks. This was new to them as it was to me. I felt sure it would make them run but I wasn't sure whether they would go toward it or away from it. Happily they bolted from the forest into the high grass, grumbling all the while. I followed as closely as I dared until finally, in hope of getting a view over the top of the high grass, I started to climb a tree. Just then they rushed back into the forest, fortunately to one side of me. I thought it was time to quit, so we started back to camp. At that moment I heard another group of elephants. They were coming out of the forest into the grass. I climbed up an ant-hill where I could see them as they passed over a ridge. There were eleven of them and not a specimen that I wanted among them. I stood watching to see what would happen next. They were about three hundred yards away when they got my wind. Back they came, rumbling, trumpeting, and squealing. I knew that I had trouble on my hands. The only thing for me to do was to stick, for if I got down in the tall grass I couldn't see anything at all. They came up over a hill, but they were not coming straight toward me and it looked as if they would pass me at forty or fifty yards; but, unfortunately, the cow in front saw me standing in full view on my ant-hill pedestal. They turned straight at me. When the leading cow was as close as I wanted her to get—about twenty-five yards—I fired. She hesitated but again surged on with the others. A second shot knocked her down. The rest surged past her, turned, smelled of her, and ran off into the forest. After a few minutes she got upon her feet and rather groggily went off after them.

Elephants have the reputation of having very bad eyesight. I personally am of the opinion that their sight is pretty good, but on this subject, as on most others about elephants, information is neither complete nor accurate. But my experience makes me think that they can see pretty well. In this case the cow that saw me was only about fifty yards away, but at another time on the Uasin Gishu Plateau an elephant herd charged me from 250 yards with the wind from them to me. The behaviour of this particular herd gave me a clue to their reputation for bad eyesight. The elephant is not afraid of any animal except man, and consequently he is not on the alert for moving objects as are animals that are hunted. Neither does he eat other animals, so he is not interested in their movements as a hunter. In fact, he isn't normally particularly interested in moving objects at all. He pays no attention. When we first came up with this herd on the Uasin Gishu Plateau we could move around within fifty yards of them without attracting their attention. However, after they got our wind and recognized us as enemies, they were able to see us at a distance of 250 yards, and charge us.

But however good the elephant's sight, it is nothing in comparison with his smelling ability. An elephant's trunk is probably the best smelling apparatus in the world, and he depends on his sense of smell more than on any other sense. When he is at all suspicious he moves his trunk around in every direction so that he catches the slightest taint in the air, from whichever way it comes. I have often seen elephants, when disturbed, with their trunks high in air reaching all around for my wind. I likewise, on one occasion, had an intimate view of a very quiet smelling operation by which an old cow escaped me. I was on an elephant path one day on Mt. Kenia looking for an elephant I had heard, when my gun-bearer gripped my shoulder and pointed into the forest. I looked and looked but could see nothing but the trees. Finally I noticed that one of the trees diminished in size toward the ground and I recognized an elephant's trunk. My eyes followed it down. At the very tip it was curled back, and this curled-back part, with the nostrils distended, was moving slowly from side to side quietly fishing for my wind. She was waiting concealed beside the trail to pick me up as I came along. She was no more than forty feet away, but when she decided to give up and moved away, I could not hear her going although it was a dense forest and she was accompanied by two youngsters. Very often in the forest where there is very little air stirring it is hard to tell the direction of the wind. I used to light wax taper matches as tests, for they could be struck without any noise and the flame would show the direction of the slightest breath of air.

In many other ways besides its smelling ability the elephant's trunk is the most extraordinary part of this most extraordinary animal. A man's arm has a more or less universal joint at the shoulder. The elephant's trunk is absolutely flexible at every point. It can turn in any direction and in whatever position it is, and has tremendous strength. There is no bone in it, of course, but it is constructed of interwoven muscle and sinew so tough that one can hardly cut it with a knife. An elephant can shoot a stream of water out of it that would put out a fire; lift a tree trunk weighing a ton and throw it easily; or it is delicate enough to pull a blade of grass with. He drinks with it, feeds himself with it, smells with it, works with it, and at times fights with it. Incidentally, a mouse that endeavoured to frighten an elephant by the traditional nursery rhyme method of running up his trunk would be blown into the next county. There is nothing else like an elephant's trunk on earth.

And for that matter, there is nothing else like the elephant. He has come down to us through the ages, surviving the conditions which killed off his earlier contemporaries, and he now adapts himself perfectly to more different conditions than any other animal in Africa.

He can eat anything that is green or ever has been green, just so long as there is enough of it. He can get his water from the aloe plants on the arid plains, or dig a well in the sand of a dry river bed with his trunk and fore feet, and drink there, or he is equally at home living half in the swamps of better-watered regions. He is at home on the low, hot plains of the seacoast at the equator or on the cool slopes of Kenia and Elgon. So far as I know, he suffers from no contagious diseases and has no enemies except man. There are elephants on Kenia that have never lain down for a hundred years. Some of the plains elephants do rest lying down, but no one ever saw a Kenia elephant lying down or any evidence that he does lie down to rest. The elephant is a good traveller. On good ground a good horse can outrun him, but on bad ground the horse would have no chance, and there are few animals that can cover more ground in a day than an elephant. And in spite of his appearance, he can turn with surprising agility and move through the forest as quietly as a rabbit.

An elephant's foot is almost as remarkable as his trunk. In the first place, his foot is encased in a baglike skin with a heavy padded bottom, with some of the characteristics of an anti-skid tire. An elephant walks on his toes. His toes form the front part of his foot and the bones of his foot run not only back but up. Underneath these bones at the back of his foot is a gelatine-like substance, which is a much more effective shock absorber than rubber heels or any other device. One of the curious things about this kind of a foot is that it swells out when the weight is on it and contracts when the weight is removed. As a consequence an elephant may sink four feet into a swamp but the minute he begins to lift his legs, his feet will contract and come out of the hole they have made without suction. The elephant's leg, being practically a perpendicular shaft, requires less muscular effort for him to stand than it does for ordinary animals. This is one of the reasons why he can go for a century without lying down.

A map of the elephant country showing Mt. Elgon and Mt. Kenia, on whose slopes Mr. Akeley has hunted elephants. It was on
Mt. Kenia that Mr. Akeley was mauled by an old bull

A country that elephants have long inhabited takes on some of the particular interest of the animals themselves. I believe that before the white man came to East Africa the elephant was nearly as much a plains animal as a forest animal, but he now tends to stay in the forests where the risk is not so great. On the plains there are no elephant paths now, if there ever were, for in open country elephants do not go in single file. But in the forests there are elephant paths everywhere. In fact, if it were not for the elephant paths travel in the forest would be almost impossible, and above the forests in the bamboo country this is equally true. One travels practically all the time on their trails and they go everywhere except in the tree ferns. Tree fern patches are not very extensive, but I have never seen an elephant track or an elephant in them. The elephants are constantly changing the paths for various reasons; among others, because the natives are in the habit of digging elephant pits in the trails. But there are some trails that have evidently been used for centuries. One time we had followed a band of elephants on the Aberdare Plateau and had devilled them until they began to travel away. We followed until the trail led through a pass in the mountains and we realized that they were going into a different region altogether. That trail in the pass was a little wider than an elephant's foot and worn six inches deep in the solid rock. It must have taken hundreds of years for the shuffling of elephants to wear that rock away.

At another place on Kenia I found an elephant passage of a stream where the trail was twenty feet wide. Single paths came in from many directions on one side of the stream and joined in this great boulevard, which crossed the stream and broke up again on the other side into the single paths radiating again in every direction. In many places where the topography of the ground is such that there is only one place for a trail there will be unmistakable evidence that the trails have stayed in the same place many years—such as trees rubbed half in two by the constant passing of the animals or damp rocks polished by the caress of their trunks. And along all the trails, old and new, are elephant signs, footprints, dung, and gobs of chewed wood and bark from which they have extracted the juices before spitting them out.

But finding the elephants is not so frequent or easy as the multiplicity of the signs would indicate. One reason is that the signs of elephants—tracks, rubbed trees, and so forth—are more or less enduring, many of them being very plain in places where the elephants have not been for months or even years. If, however, you come on fresh elephant tracks, not more than a day old, you can usually catch up with the elephants, for as they feed along through the country they do not go fast. Only if they are making a trek from one region to another it may take much longer to catch them.

Once up with an elephant, if you are shooting, you are pretty sure that, even if he is charging you, a bullet from an elephant gun, hitting him in the head, will stop him even if it does not hit him in a vital spot. Moreover, if you stop the leader of a bunch that is charging you, the bunch will stop. I never heard of a case in which the leader of an elephant charge was stopped and the others kept on, and I doubt if we ever will hear of such a thing, for if it does happen there won't be any one to tell about it. It is unusual for an elephant to keep on after being hit even if the hit does not knock him down. The old cow that charged me at the head of ten others was rather the exception to this rule, for after my first shot stopped her she came on again until my second shot knocked her down. But I had one experience that was entirely at variance with this rule. One old bull took thirteen shots from my rifle and about as many from Mrs. Akeley's before he was content either to die or run away.

In Uganda, after six months in the up-country after elephants, we decided to go down to the Uasin Gishu Plateau for lion spearing, for the rainy season was beginning and the vegetation growing so thick that elephant hunting was getting very difficult. On the way down we came one morning upon the fresh trail of a herd of elephants. We followed for about two hours in a high bush country over which were scattered clumps of trees. Finally we came upon the elephants at the time of their mid-day siesta. The middle of the day is the quietest time of the twenty-four hours with elephants. If they are in a herd, they will bunch together in the shade. They do not stand absolutely still, but mill about very slowly, changing positions in the bunch but not leaving. They are neither feeding nor travelling but, as nearly as they ever do, resting. I even saw a young bull once rest his tusks in the crotch of a tree during this resting period. We got up to within twenty-five yards of them behind some bushes down the wind. We finally decided upon one of the bulls as the target. Mrs. Akeley studied carefully and shot. The bull went down, apparently dead. Ordinarily, we should rush in for a finishing shot, but in this case the rest of the herd did not make off promptly, so we stood still. When they did go off we started toward the apparently dead animal. As we did so, he got upon his feet and, in spite of a volley from us, kept on after the herd. We followed, and after half an hour's travel we caught sight of him again. We kept along behind him, looking for a place where we could swing out to one side and get abreast to fire a finishing shot at him. He was moving slowly and groggily. It was hard to move anywhere except in his trail without making a noise, and I suddenly discovered that the trail was turning so that the wind was from us to him.

Immediately we swung off to one side, but it was too late. I didn't see him when he got our wind but I knew perfectly he had it for there was the sudden crash of his wheel in the bushes and a scream. An elephant's scream is loud and shrill and piercing. And it is terrifying, too—at least to any one who knows elephants—for it means an angry animal and usually a charge. Then came a series of grunts and rumblings. A second or two later he came in sight, his ears spread out twelve feet from tip to tip, his trunk up and jerking fiercely from side to side. There is no way of describing how big an elephant looks under these conditions, or the speed at which he comes. At about thirty yards I shot, but he took it. He stopped, seemingly puzzled but unhurt. I shot the second barrel and looked for my other gun which was thirty feet behind me. The boy ran up with it and I emptied both barrels into the elephant's head, and still he took it like a sand hill. In the meanwhile, Mrs. Akeley had been firing, too. And then he turned and went off again. I went back to Mrs. Akeley. Everything that I knew about elephant shooting had failed to apply in this case. I had stopped him with one shot. That was normal enough. But then I had put three carefully aimed shots into his head at short range, any one of which should have killed him. And he had taken them with only a slight flinch and then had gone off. I felt completely helpless. Turning to Mrs. Akeley, I said:

"This elephant is pretty well shot up, and perhaps we had better wait for developments."

She said: "No, we started it; so let's finish it."

I agreed as we reloaded, and we were about to start following when his screaming, grunting, roaring attack began again. Exactly the same thing happened as the first time except that this time Mrs. Akeley, the boy, and I were all together. We fired as we had before. He stopped with the first shot and took all the others standing, finally turning and retreating again. Apparently our shots had no effect except to make him stop and think. I was sick of it, for maybe next time he wouldn't stop and evidently we couldn't knock him down. We had about finished reloading when we heard him once more. There was nothing to do but stand the charge, for to run was fatal. So we waited. There was an appreciable time when I could hear his onrush but couldn't see him. Then I caught sight of him. He wasn't coming straight for us, but was charging at a point thirty yards to one side of us and thrashing back and forth a great branch of tree in his trunk. Why his charge was so misdirected I didn't know, but I was profoundly grateful. As he ran I had a good brain shot from the side. I fired, and he fell stone dead. With the greatest sense of relief in the world I went over to him. As I stood by the carcass I felt very small indeed. Mrs. Akeley sat down and drew a long breath before she spoke.

"I want to go home," she said at last, "and keep house for the rest of my life."

Then I heard a commotion in the bush in front of the dead elephant and as I looked up a black boy carrying a cringing monkey appeared. Only the boy wasn't black. He was scared to an ashen colour and he was still trembling, and the monkey was as frightened as the boy. It was J. T. Jr., Mrs. Akeley's pet monkey, and Alli, the monkey's nurse. They had followed to see the sport without our knowledge, and they had drawn the elephant's last charge.

This experience with an animal that continued to make charge after charge was new to me. It has never happened again and I hope never will, but it shows that with elephants it isn't safe to depend on any fixed rule, for elephants vary as much as people do. This one was the heaviest-skulled elephant I ever saw, and the shots that I had fired would have killed any ordinary animal. But in his case all but the last shot had been stopped by bone.

I couldn't measure his height, but I measured his ear as one indication of his size. It was the biggest I ever heard of. And his tusks were good sized—80 pounds. He was a very big animal, but his foot measurement was not so large as the big bull of the Budongo Forest. Later I made a dining table of his ear, supporting it on three tusks for legs. With the wooden border it was eight feet long and seated eight people very comfortably.

Most wild animals, if they smell man and have an opportunity to get away, make the most of it. Even a mother with young will usually try to escape trouble rather than bring it on, although, of course, they are quickest to fight. But elephants are not always in this category. In the open it has been my experience that they would rather leave than provoke a fight; if you hunt elephants in the forest, you are quite likely to find that two can play the hunting game, and find yourself pretty actively hunted by the elephants. If the elephants after you are making a noise, it gives you a good chance. When they silently wait for you, the game is much more dangerous.

The old bull, who is in the centre of the elephant group in the Museum of Natural History now, tried to get me by this silent method. I was out on a trail and I saw that a big bunch of animals were near. I wasn't following any particular trail for they had moved about so that signs were everywhere and much confused. Finally I came to a gully. It wasn't very broad or very deep, but the trail I was on turned up it to where a crossing could be made on the level. The forest here was high and very thick, and consequently it was quite dark. As I looked up the trail I saw a group of big shapes through the branches. I thought they were elephants and peered carefully at them, but they turned out to be boulders. A minute later I saw across the gully another similar group of boulders, but as I peered at them I saw through a little opening in the leaves, plain and unmistakable, an elephant's tusk. I watched it carefully. It moved a little, and behind it I caught a glimpse of the other tusk. They were big, and I decided that he would do for my group. I couldn't get a glimpse of his eye or anything to sight by, so I carefully calculated where his brain ought to be from the place where his tusk entered his head, and fired. Then there was the riot of an elephant herd suddenly starting. A few seconds later there was a crash. "He's down," I thought, and Bill, the gun boy, and I ran over to the place where the animals had been. We followed their tracks a little way and found where one of the elephants had been down, but he had recovered and gone on. However, he had evidently gone off by himself when he got up, for while the others had gone down an old trail he had gone straight through the jungle, breaking a new way as he went. With Bill in the lead, we pushed along behind him. It was a curious trail, for it went straight ahead without deviation as if it had been laid by compass. One hour went by and then another. We had settled down for a long trek. The going wasn't very good and the forest was so thick that we could not see in any direction. We were pushing along in this fashion when, with a crash and a squeal, an elephant burst across our path within fifteen feet of us. It was absolutely without warning, and had the charge been straight on us we could hardly have escaped. As it was, I fired two hurried shots as he disappeared in the growth on the opposite side of the trail. The old devil had grown tired of being hunted and had doubled back on his own trail to wait for us. He had been absolutely silent. We hadn't heard a thing, and his plan failed, I think, only because the growth was so thick that he charged us on scent or sound without being able to see us. I heard him go through the forest a way and then stop. I followed until I found a place a little more open than the rest, and with this between me and the trees he was in I waited. I could hear him grumbling in there from time to time. I didn't expect him to last much longer so I got my lunch and ate it while I listened and watched. I had just finished and had a puff or two on my pipe when he let out another squeal and charged. He evidently had moved around until he had wind of me. I didn't see him but I heard him, and grabbing the gun I stood ready. But he didn't come. Instead I heard the breaking of the bushes as he collapsed. His last effort had been too much for him.

The efforts of the next elephant who tried the quiet waiting game on me were almost too much for me.

We had just come down from the ice fields seventeen thousand feet up on the summit of Mt. Kenia, overlord of the game regions of British East Africa, and had come out of the forest directly south of the pinnacle and within two or three miles of an old camping ground in the temperate climate, five or six thousand feet above sea level, where we had camped five years before and again one year before. Instead of going on around toward the west to the base camp we decided to stop here and have the base camp brought up to us. Mrs. Akeley was tired, so she said she would stay at the camp and rest; and I decided to take advantage of the time it would take to bring up the base camp to go back into the bamboo and get some forest photographs.

There was perfectly good elephant country around our camp but I wanted to go back up where the forests stop and the bamboo flourishes, because it was a bamboo setting that I had selected for the group of elephants I was then working on for the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History. I started out with four days' rations, gun boys, porters, camera men, and so forth—fifteen men in all. The second day out brought me to about nine thousand feet above sea level where the bamboo began. Following a well-worn elephant trail in search of this photographic material, I ran on to a trail of three old bulls. The tracks were old—probably as much as four days—but the size was so unusual that I decided to postpone the photography and follow them. I did not expect to have to catch up their four days' travel, for I hoped that they would be feeding in the neighbourhood and that the trail I was on would cross a fresher trail made in their wanderings around for food. I had run upon their tracks first about noon. I followed until dark without finding any fresher signs. The next morning we started out at daybreak and finally entered an opening such as elephants use as a feeding ground. It is their custom to mill around in these openings, eating the vegetation and trampling it down until it offers little more, and then move on. In six months or so it will be grown up again eight or ten feet high and they are very apt to revisit it and go through the same process again. Soon after we entered this opening I came suddenly upon fresh tracks of the elephants I had been following. Not only were the tracks fresh but the droppings were still steaming and I knew that the animals were not far away; certainly they had been there not more than an hour before. I followed the trail amongst the low bush in the opening but it merely wandered about repeatedly bringing me back to the place where I had first seen the fresh tracks, and I realized that I might do this indefinitely without getting closer to the elephants. I decided to go outside the opening and circle around it to see if I could find the trail of my bulls as they entered the forest. This opening was at the point on the mountain where the forest proper and the bamboos merged. I followed an elephant path out of the opening on the bamboo side and had gone but a little way when I discovered fresh signs of my three bulls, who had evidently left the opening by the same path that I was following, and at about the same time I heard the crackling of bamboo ahead, probably about two hundred yards away. This was the signal for preparation for the final stalk.

I stood for a moment watching one of the trackers going up the trail to a point where it turned at right angles in the direction of the sounds I had heard. There he stopped at rest, having indicated to me by signs that they had gone in that direction. I turned my back to the trail, watching the porters select a place to lay down their loads amidst a clump of large trees that would afford some protection in case of a stampede in their direction. The gun boys came forward presenting the guns for inspection. I took the gun from the second boy, sending him back with the porters. After examining this gun I gave it to the first boy and took his. When I had examined this I leaned it against my body while I chafed my hands which were numb from the cold mists of the morning, knowing that I might soon need a supple trigger finger. During this time the first gun boy was taking the cartridges, one by one, from his bandoleer and holding them up for my inspection—the ordinary precaution to insure that all the ammunition was the right kind, and an important insurance, because only a full steel-jacketed bullet will penetrate an elephant's head. While still warming my hands, inspecting the cartridges, and standing with the gun leaning against my stomach, I was suddenly conscious that an elephant was almost on top of me. I have no knowledge of how the warning came. I have no mental record of hearing him, seeing him, or of any warning from the gun boy who faced me and who must have seen the elephant as he came down on me from behind. There must have been some definite signal, but it was not recorded in my mind. I only know that as I picked up my gun and wheeled about I tried to shove the safety catch forward. It refused to budge, and I remember the thought that perhaps I had left the catch forward when I inspected the gun and that if not I must pull the triggers hard enough to fire the gun anyway. This is an impossibility, but I remember distinctly the determination to do it, for the all-powerful impulse in my mind was that I must shoot instantly. Then something happened that dazed me. I don't know whether I shot or not. My next mental record is of a tusk right at my chest. I grabbed it with my left hand, the other one with my right hand, and swinging in between them went to the ground on my back. This swinging in between the tusks was purely automatic. It was the result of many a time on the trails imagining myself caught by an elephant's rush and planning what I would do, and a very profitable planning, too; for I am convinced that if a man imagines such a crisis and plans what he would do, he will, when the occasion occurs, automatically do what he planned. Anyway, I firmly believe that my imaginings along the trail saved my life.

He drove his tusks into the ground on either side of me, his curled-up trunk against my chest. I had a realization that I was being crushed, and as I looked into one wicked little eye above me I knew I could expect no mercy from it. This thought was perfectly clear and definite in my mind. I heard a wheezy grunt as he plunged down and then—oblivion.

The thing that dazed me was a blow from the elephant's trunk as he swung it down to curl it back out of harm's way. It broke my nose and tore my cheek open to the teeth. Had it been an intentional blow it would have killed me instantly. The part of the trunk that scraped off most of my face was the heavy bristles on the knuckle-like corrugations of the skin of the under side.

When he surged down on me, his big tusks evidently struck something in the ground that stopped them. Of course my body offered practically no resistance to his weight, and I should have been crushed as thin as a wafer if his tusks hadn't met that resistance—stone, root, or something—underground. He seems to have thought me dead for he left me—by some good fortune not stepping on me—and charged off after the boys. I never got much information out of the boys as to what did happen, for they were not proud of their part in the adventure. However, there were plenty of signs that the elephant had run out into the open space again and charged all over it; so it is reasonable to assume that they had scattered through it like a covey of quail and that he had trampled it down trying to find the men whose tracks and wind filled the neighbourhood.

Usually, when an elephant kills a man, it will return to its victim and gore him again, or trample him, or pull his legs or arms off with its trunk. I knew of one case where a man's porters brought in his arm which the elephant that had killed him had pulled off his body and left lying on the ground. In my case, happily, the elephant for some reason did not come back. I lay unconscious for four or five hours. In the meanwhile, when they found the coast was clear, the porters and gun boys returned and made camp, intending, no doubt, to keep guard over my body until Mrs. Akeley, to whom they had sent word, could reach me. They did not, however, touch me, for they believed that I was dead, and neither the Swahili Mohammedans nor the Kikuyus will touch a dead man. So they built a fire and huddled around it and I lay unconscious in the cold mountain rain at a little distance, with my body crushed and my face torn open. About five o'clock I came to in a dazed way and was vaguely conscious of seeing a fire. I shouted, and a little later I felt myself being carried by the shoulders and legs. Later again I had a lucid spell and realized that I was lying in one of the porter's tents, and I got clarity of mind enough to ask where my wife was. The boys answered that she was back in camp. That brought the events back to me, how I had left her at camp, found the trail of the three old bulls, followed them and, finally, how I was knocked out. I was entirely helpless. I could move neither my arms nor legs and I reached the conclusion that my back was broken. I could not move, but I felt no pain whatever. However, my coldness and numbness brought to my mind a bottle of cocktails, and I ordered one of the boys to bring it to me. My powers of resistance must have been very low, for he poured all there was in the bottle down my throat. In the intervals of consciousness, also, I got them to give me hot bovril—a British beef tea—and quinine. The result of all this was that the cold and numbness left me. I moved my arms. The movement brought pain, but I evidently wasn't entirely paralyzed. I moved my toes, then my feet, then my legs. "Why," I thought in some surprise, "my back isn't broken at all!" So before I dropped off again for the night I knew that I had some chance of recovery. The first time I regained consciousness in the morning, I felt that Mrs. Akeley was around. I asked the boys if she had come. They said no, and I told them to fire my gun every fifteen minutes. Then I dropped off into unconsciousness again and awoke to see her sitting by me on the ground.

When the elephant got me, the boys had sent two runners to tell Mrs. Akeley. They arrived about six in the evening. It was our custom when separated to send notes to each other, or at least messages. When these boys came on to say that an elephant had got me, and when she found that there was no word from me, it looked bad. Mrs. Akeley sent word to the nearest government post for a doctor and started her preparations to come to me that night. She had to go after her guides, even into the huts of a native village, for they did not want to start at night. Finally, about midnight, she got under way. She pushed along with all speed until about daybreak, when the guides confessed that they were lost. At this juncture she was sitting on a log, trying to think what to do next. And then she heard my gun. She answered, but it was more than an hour before the sounds of her smaller rifle reached our camp. And about an hour after the boys heard her gun she arrived.

She asked me how I was, and I said that I was all right. I noticed a peculiar expression on her face. If I had had a looking glass, I should probably have understood it better. One eye was closed and the forehead over it skinned. My nose was broken and my cheek cut so that it hung down, exposing my teeth. I was dirty all over, and from time to time spit blood from the hemorrhages inside. Altogether, I was an unlovely subject and looked hardly worth saving. But I did get entirely over it all, although it took me three months in bed. The thing that was serious was that the elephant had crushed several of my ribs into my lungs, and these internal injuries took a long time to heal. As a matter of fact, I don't suppose I would have pulled through even with Mrs. Akeley's care if it hadn't been for a Scotch medical missionary who nearly ran himself to death coming to my rescue. He had been in the country only a little while and perhaps this explains his coming so fast when news reached him of a man who had been mauled by an elephant. The chief medical officer at Fort Hall, knowing better what elephant mauling usually meant, came, but he didn't hurry. I saw him later and he apologized, but I felt no grievance. I understood the situation. Usually when an elephant gets a man a doctor can't do anything for him.

But this isn't always so. Some months later I sat down in the hotel at Nairobi with three other men, who like myself had been caught by elephants and had lived to tell the tale. An elephant caught Black in his trunk, and threw him into a bush that broke his fall. The elephant followed him and stepped on him, the bush this time forming a cushion that saved him, and although the elephant returned two or three times to give him a final punch, he was not killed. However, he was badly broken up.

Outram and a companion approached an elephant that was shot and down, when the animal suddenly rose, grabbed Outram in his trunk and threw him. The elephant followed him, but Outram scrambled into the grass while the elephant trampled his pith helmet into the ground, whereupon Outram got right under the elephant's tail and stuck to this position while the elephant turned circles trying to find him, until, becoming faint from his injuries, Outram dived into the grass at one side. Outram's companion by this time got back into the game and killed the elephant.

Hutchinson's story I have forgotten a little now, but I remember that he said the elephant caught him, brushed the ground with him, and then threw him. The elephant followed him and Hutchinson put off fate a few seconds by somehow getting amongst the elephant's legs. The respite was enough, for the gun boy, by this time, began firing and drove the elephant off.

In all of these cases, unlike mine, the elephants had used their trunks to pick up their victims and to throw them, and they had intended finishing them by trampling on them. This use of the trunk seems more common than the charge with the tusks that had so nearly finished me. Up in Somaliland Dudo Muhammud, my gun boy, showed me the spot where he had seen an elephant kill an Italian prince. The elephant picked the prince up in his trunk and beat him against his tusks, the prince, meanwhile, futilely beating the elephant's head with his fists. Then the elephant threw him upon the ground, walked on him, and then squatted on him, rubbing back and forth until he had rubbed his body into the ground.

But elephants do use their tusks and use them with terrible effect. About the time we were in the Budongo Forest, Mr. and Mrs. Longdon were across Lake Albert in the Belgian Congo. One day Longdon shot a bull elephant and stood watching the herd disappear, when a cow came down from behind, unheard and unseen, ran her tusk clear through him and, with a toss of her head, threw him into the bush and went on. Longdon lived four days.

But although the elephant is a terrible fighter in his own defence when attacked by man, that is not his chief characteristic. The things that stick in my mind are his sagacity, his versatility, and a certain comradeship which I have never noticed to the same degree in other animals. I like to think of the picture of the two old bulls helping along their comrade wounded by Major Harrison's gun; to think of several instances I have seen of a phenomenon, which I am sure is not accidental, when the young and husky elephants formed the outer ring of a group protecting the older ones from the scented danger. I like to think back to the day I saw the group of baby elephants playing with a great ball of baked dirt two and a half feet in diameter which, in their playing, they rolled for more than half a mile, and the playfulness with which this same group teased the babies of a herd of buffalo until the cow buffaloes chased them off. I think, too, of the extraordinary fact that I have never heard or seen African elephants fighting each other. They have no enemy but man and are at peace amongst themselves.

It is my friend the elephant that I hope to perpetuate in the central group in the Roosevelt African Hall as it is now planned for the American Museum of Natural History—a hall with groups of African animal skins mounted on sculptured bodies, with backgrounds painted from the country itself. In this, which we hope will be an everlasting monument to the Africa that was, the Africa that is now fast disappearing, I hope to place the elephant group on a pedestal in the centre of the hall—the rightful place for the first animal of them all.

And it may not be many years before such museum exhibits are the only remaining records of my jungle friends. As civilization advances in Africa, the extinction of the elephant is being accomplished slowly but quite as surely as that of the American buffalo two generations ago. It is probably not true that the African elephant cannot be domesticated. In fact, somewhere in the Congo is a farm where fifty tame elephants, just as amenable as those in India, are at work. But taming elephants is not a sound proposition economically. Elephant farming is a prince's game, and Africa has no princes to play it. An elephant requires hundreds of acres of land, infinitely more than cattle and sheep and the other domesticated animals. So it is that as man moves on the land, the elephant must move off.

Moreover, African settlers are making every effort to hasten the process. Wherever the elephants refuse to be confined to their bailiwicks and annoy the natives by raiding their farms, the Government has appointed official elephant killers. The South African elephant in the Addoo bush was condemned to be exterminated several years ago. Here, however, the hunters sent into the bush to kill them off found the elephant too much for them and finally gave up the attempt. Now they are being shot only as they come out to molest the natives, with the result that they are able to persist in the bush in limited numbers. Uganda also has official elephant killers wherever the elephants make trouble in the natives' gardens. In British East Africa and in Tanganyika a similar situation exists. The game must eventually disappear as the country is settled, and with it will be wiped out the charm of Africa.

We had heard much of Ruindi Plains in the Belgian Congo as the wonderful game country that it no doubt used to be. To me it seems avast graveyard. There, too, commercialism has played its part in exterminating the animals and, while we found two or three species of antelope and many lions, other large game is very rare. I suppose that the Ruindi Valley was discovered among the last of the great game pockets and that ivory poachers are responsible for the disappearance of much of the other game as well as of the elephant. The forested valley, which I went through for perhaps ten miles, carried every evidence of having been a wonderful game country in the past, but only a pitiful remnant of the splendid animals who once made it their home remains. Along great elephant boulevards, all overgrown, weaving through the forest, one may occasionally track a single elephant or a small band. A small herd of buffalo grazes where a few years ago there were great numbers.

In our journey north from Cape Town by rail we saw not a single head of game until we reached the Lualaba River, and during the five days that we spent going down that river we saw only a few antelope, perhaps a half dozen elephants and, as I remember it, two or three hippopotami. On the entire journey to within fifty miles of Lake Edward and in all our hunting we found signs of only a few small bands of elephants. Men have spoken of darkest Africa, but the dark chapters of African history are only now being written by the inroads of civilization.

CHAPTER III MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH LIONS

For many thousands of years lions have appeared in literature and art as savage and ferocious animals. For about that length of time man has been attacking lions and when the lions fought back man has set down this judgment against them. At the same time, with the criticism of his savagery, man has put in all his records testimony to the courage, strength, and fighting qualities of what has been called through the ages the King of Beasts.

The lion's savagery is very much the same as man's—that is, he kills other animals for food and not having developed any specialized industries like the packers, each lion kills for himself. His day's work, instead of getting money to buy food, consists chiefly in getting food, and he goes about it something in this manner. About dusk he comes out from his resting place, yawns, stretches, and looks about for something to eat. In East Africa his favourite diet is zebra, but he likes any of the game animals, and he prefers the larger animals to the smaller antelope because the larger ones are easier to catch. His intention is to get his food the easiest and quickest way. He goes out on the plains and by scent, sight, and hearing locates a herd of zebra, for example. He then gets down wind from what he hopes will be his next meal and stalks to within rushing distance. He can outrun a zebra for a short distance, and when within striking distance he makes a sudden dash. I think that the zebra is thrown by the lion's spring and then killed by a bite in the back of the neck, but this impression is from deduction and not from observation. I have seen a lot of animals that lions had killed but I never saw a lion in the act of killing. In fact, the methods which lions use in hunting are not known in detail from observation, for not enough instances have ever been witnessed and recorded to make the basis for any general statement which could be considered scientifically accurate.

When he has captured his animal the lion will eat and then lie near it perhaps all night, perhaps all the next day, if he is not disturbed, eating as he desires. If he leaves his kill the jackals, hyenas, and vultures will clean it up immediately, and as the lion kills for food and not for sport or the pleasure of killing, he is content with one kill as long as the meat lasts.

The lion group, as I have designed it for the Roosevelt African Hall, will show in the foreground a trickling stream where the lions have come at dawn to drink, while, at a distance on the plains, the vultures and jackals are approaching the kill the lions have just left.

Lion hunters are not agreed about how much lions depend on sight, on sound, and on smell. It is not altogether easy to tell how soon they know the presence of man or of other animals, for they do not always show what they know. For instance, I once had the startling experience of getting within three feet of a lioness before she moved. She, of course, knew I was there long before I got that close, and yet until I almost stepped on her she made no sign. There is, however, no question but that the lion has a sharp, far sight in the daytime, and from the size of the pupil and his nocturnal habits of hunting I think he has unusually keen sight at night. I have never seen any indication that a lion has the keen smell of a dog or any animal that hunts by scent, nor have I ever seen anything to make me believe that he has any abnormal sense of hearing.

While many things about lions' habits are controversial, I think that practically everyone who has had experience with them will agree that they are not savage in the sense of killing for the mere sake of killing. There are a few isolated cases which seem to conflict with this statement, but the great mass of testimony confirms it. There was a seeming exception to this rule which happened to an English traveller and his wife in Somaliland. They were intent on getting a lion by "baiting"—that is, they killed an animal and left it as bait for the lions while they hid in a thorn boma which they built near by. There was only a small hole in the boma through which to watch and shoot. They stationed a black boy at this hole to watch while they slept. They awoke to find that a lion had stuck his head into the hole and killed the black boy—bitten his head clear off, so the local story goes. However, no one knows why the lion killed the boy in this case for, of the three possible witnesses, two were asleep and the third dead.

It is possible, of course, that the lion deliberately attacked the boma without provocation, but it seems unlikely, for lions are driven to these extremities chiefly by hunger; and in this case the lion could have satisfied his hunger by the bait that had been laid out for him. The usual man-eater is an old lion, who in the season of scattered game finds it impossible with his failing strength and speed to catch animals for food. To keep from starving he attacks the native flocks and herds, or the natives themselves. The most famous man-eaters, the lions of Tsavo, which spread such terror as almost to stop construction on a part of the Uganda railway, were, indeed, an exception to the rule. Colonel Patterson, whose classic account of them is one of the great animal stories of the world, accounted for these young, vigorous animals becoming man-eaters because some of the coolie workers who died were put in the bush unburied and the lions had acquired a taste for human flesh by eating these bodies. After this taste was acquired these lions hunted men just as the ordinary lion hunted zebras. They made a regular business of it. It was their daily fare, and they took a terrible toll before they were finally killed. But these lions were killing for food just as if they were killing zebras.

Even when forced to fight, the lion is not vindictive. If an elephant gets a man he is likely to trample on his victim and mutilate him even after he is dead. I have never known of lions doing this. On the other hand, as soon as their adversary is dead, often as soon as he is quiet, they will let him alone. The game animals on which the lions are accustomed to feed corroborate this characteristic. They know that the lion kills for food at night and they likewise know that he kills only for food, so in the daytime they do not bother about lions particularly. I have seen lions trot through a herd of game within easy striking distance of many of the animals without causing any disturbance.

So far as I know, except for the comparatively few man-eaters, lions are never the aggressors. More than that, they prefer to get out of the way of man rather than fight him, and they will put up with a good deal of disturbance and inconvenience and even pain before they will fight. But once decided to fight they will fight with an amazing courage even if there are plenty of opportunities to escape.

I had an experience which showed both these aspects of a lion's nature. Frederick M. Stephenson, John T. McCutcheon, the cartoonist, Mrs. Akeley, and I were hunting lions. I had a moving-picture camera and the others were armed with guns. One day the natives rounded up a lioness in a patch of uncommonly tall, thick grass. The beaters hesitated to go in after her, so I took a gun and McCutcheon and I joined the porters, leaving Stephenson and Mrs. Akeley outside. The grass was so thick that we had to take our rifles in both hands and push the grass down in front of us and then walk on it. We had made some progress in this manner when suddenly, as we were pushing down the grass, it was thrown violently back, jerking our rifles up and almost throwing us over. It was the lioness. We had pressed the grass down right on her back. Yet despite this intrusion she made off and did not attack us.

As she went out of the grass into the open, Stephenson shot at her and missed. Some of the boys rode after her on horseback and rounded her up in another patch of cover. By this time, however, her patience had run out. She could have run some more had she wanted to, but she didn't want to. When Stephenson approached the cover with his gun boys she took the initiative and charged. His first shot stopped her a second, but she came on again. His second shot killed her.

My first black-maned lion showed the same characteristics. He, too, preferred peace to war, although I originally disturbed him with his kill, but finally, when he declared war, although he was badly wounded, he preferred to charge two white men and thirty natives rather than try to escape.

I had gone up on the Mau Plateau to shoot topi. The plateau is about 8,000 feet above sea level there and I didn't expect to find any lions. One day I discovered two topi in a little valley between two gentle rises. I was crawling up to the top of one of the rises overlooking the valley to get a shot when I noticed some movement in the grass on the slope opposite. I thought it was another topi. As I raised myself a little to shoot I noticed that the original pair that I was hunting were gazing with fixed attention toward some movement on the far hillside. I looked again and saw an old lion get up and walk to the top of the hill, turn round facing me, and lie down to watch the valley from his side as I was watching it from mine. We were about 400 yards from each other. In the valley between were the topi, and also I noticed a dead zebra. Evidently I had disturbed him at his previous night's kill. My pony and gun boys were some distance behind and I had only one cartridge left in my double-barrelled cordite rifle. Under these conditions I reluctantly decided to go back for proper equipment. My reluctance was not merely at losing a lion but at losing that particular lion, for he had a great black mane and no one had killed a black-maned lion in that part of Africa.

By the time I got back with my cartridges and the gun boys, he had disappeared. We began beating about to see if we could find him or his trail, but without success. We did, however, find the remains of several kills, which led me to think that this single old fellow had found the neighbourhood good hunting, and was making a more or less prolonged stay. Under the circumstances I felt it wise to go to camp and get my companion, Shaw Kennedy, and our thirty beaters to hunt him out the next day.

Before going, however, I planned a campaign. Not far from where the lion had been a ravine began, which ran some distance and ended in a thick piece of forest. The sides of the ravine were covered with clumps of thick bush. Into one of these I felt sure the lion had retreated. Unless closely pushed he would not go into the forest. My plan was to enter the ravine the next day at the forest end so that he could not escape to safety among the trees, and drive up the ravine to force him out into the open.

When we got to the edge of the forest the next morning Kennedy and I drew lots for the choice of position. He won and chose the upper end of the ravine toward which we were to drive, while I was to follow up behind the beaters to get him if he broke back. Of course we were not sure that our quarry was even in the neighbourhood, but I had great hope of everything except getting this first black-maned specimen myself, for Kennedy's position made it almost certain that he would get the animal if any one did. The first patch of bush that the beaters tackled was about 100 yards long and 50 yards wide. As they set up their usual racket before entering I thought I heard a lion's grunt, but as nothing more developed I concluded it had been merely some of the boys. This patch of bush was a mass of nettles, briers, and thorns, and made exceedingly disagreeable going. The porters were making very slow progress, so I went in to encourage them. However, by the time we were halfway through I was so scratched and torn that I quit and went out toward the bottom of the ravine. The briers had somewhat cooled my faith in the theory that the lion was in the ravine. I sat down on an ant-hill where I had a fair view. Kennedy fired and I looked quickly. The lion which had come out in front of Kennedy had turned and was running down across the ravine and up the other side. I had a good shot at him and the bullet knocked him over. However, he got up and went into a clump of bush. This clump just filled a kind of pot hole about fifty yards in diameter. Kennedy watched one side and I the other so that we had every avenue of escape covered. The beaters then began throwing stones and sticks into the bush. The lion made no move. He might be dead or he might be lying close. We wanted to know, but no one wanted to know sufficiently to crawl in and see. Finally Dudo, my gun-bearer, suggested that we light a fire and make some firebrands. We busied ourselves with this. In the meanwhile, there was no response from the lion. When the firebrands were ready Dudo asked leave to throw the first one for he maintained that he knew where the lion was. Dudo threw, and as his firebrand disappeared in the brush there was a roar and a shaking of the bushes that told exactly where the beast was hidden. A shower of firebrands followed but with no effect. Then the boys threw rocks. But nothing resulted. By this time Kennedy had joined the crowd. All the beaters and both of us were grouped on one side of the pot hole. Dudo now took a small-bore rifle and fired, not in an effort to kill the lion but to move him. It succeeded, and he moved, not away from us but toward us. The way of retreat was open but he didn't take it. Dudo fired again, and again the bushes moved toward us. Finally the old fellow was so close to the edge of the brush that while we couldn't see him he undoubtedly could see us. He stood looking out on thirty black men and two white men in front of a great fire—a crowd of his enemies. The path was not blocked in any other direction. He looked us over carefully for fully five minutes and then of his own volition, with a great roar, he charged out of the brush and up from the pot hole. Halfway up the slope the fatal bullet hit him. He was killed charging his enemies and without thought of retreat—the first black-maned lion ever shot in British East Africa.

He was old and had been through various vicissitudes. At one time he had had a leg broken but it had healed perfectly. The tip of his tail was gone also. But for all that he was a great specimen.

These two instances are fair examples of the usual method of hunting lions in British East Africa. Riding after them on horseback might be considered a different method than the beating, but as a matter of fact, the two merge into each other. When beating, the lion hunter usually rides until he actually reaches the lion's cover, and if he runs on to a lion in the open he rides after it until the superior speed of the horse over any fair distance forces the lion to stop and lie down at bay. And, likewise, if one is riding after lions and the lion gets into cover, the game is up unless there are beaters to get him out.

Paul Rainey introduced an added element to the horseback method of lion hunting when he imported his lion hounds. I call them lion hounds for they chased lions—that is the only thing the pack had in common. It included curs, collies, airedales, bear hounds from the South, and almost every other kind of canine. When Rainey and the hounds appeared, the Governor of East Africa remarked that the lions were going to get some good dog meat. But within a couple of years "hounding lions" was stopped because the lions fell too easy a prey to the hounds and hunters. When Rainey took his hounds there no one was certain how the lions would act, and it was a sporting thing to try. But it soon developed—and Rainey, who is a thorough sportsman, was one of the first to see it—that the hounds kept the lion so busy once he was brought to bay that the hunter could approach and take as many shots as necessary with almost perfect immunity from a charge. It is not quite accurate to say that Rainey introduced the practice of hunting lions with dogs. Foa, the French traveller, speaks of the practice ten years before Rainey went to Africa. He even tried to organize a pack. His pack failed. But the principle of having dogs keep the lions so busy that they would not charge, he described completely.

Besides these daylight methods of hunting it was a common practice to hunt lions at night by baiting—that is, to kill an animal and hide near it in the hope that a lion would come to eat, and then shoot him. There is not much danger in this, for the thorn bomas, or hiding places, are a good protection, and the lion would not be likely to attack any one unless he was shot at or molested. There is, of course, the instance of the black man killed in the boma in Somaliland, but that event is the exception.

As a method of killing lions, night baiting is not very sportsmanlike, but as a method of photographing it is not only legitimate but it has produced by far the best lion pictures ever made in Africa—especially those of Schilling and A. Radclyffe Dugmore. Rainey and Buffalo Jones got some remarkable moving pictures of hunting lions with dogs, but the total number of all pictures of live lions ever taken is still in keeping with the small amount of detailed and accurate knowledge of lions' habits which we have. To my mind the finest lion-hunting picture ever taken was brought back by Lady Grace McKenzie. Her operator got a moving picture of a wounded lion charging. It shows the lion's rush from the bush at Lady McKenzie and her companion—a white man. It shows the man turn and run and the lion rush right by Lady McKenzie after him. There the picture ends. On his recent trip Martin Johnson got a motion picture of five lions crossing the plains, one of which was shot by Mr. Johnson.

But neither beating, baiting, nor hounding is the really sportsmanlike method of hunting lions—it is spearing, and spearing takes a black man.

One time in Uganda, after I had been under a considerable strain while elephant hunting, I decided that I needed a rest and a change. I set out for the Uasin Gishu Plateau where I got together one hundred Nandi spearmen. We had no difficulty in getting volunteers, for they were to be paid and fed for playing the game they loved. During the first half day out from the government station, where we gathered our force together, the alarm of lion was sounded. We were approaching a patch of bush. The spearmen entered the bush from all sides. I placed my motion-picture camera at a point of vantage. The idea was to drive the lion out in front of the camera and have the spearmen at that point spear him. Above the din of the spearmen in the bush I finally heard the angry growl of a leopard. There was great excitement in the bush for a few seconds. Then three of the boys came out of the bush. The middle boy of the three was being carried and his scalp was hanging down over his face. Behind this trio came a group carrying the dead leopard. Later, when his skin was stretched, it showed sixty spear holes.

I promptly took the wounded boy under the shade of a mimosa tree, shaved him, and sewed his scalp back into place and cared for his other wounds. He showed little interest in the proceedings beyond asking a question of the other black boys about what I was doing. Seemingly the whole operation was over before he recovered from the shock of his mauling. The next morning when I sent him home he was much troubled. He said that he had not committed any offence and he did not see why he had to be sent home. His wounds did not seem to trouble him or to dampen the ardour of the others in the slightest.

We went on for a week. One day, just as we were making camp near a waterfall, an alarm was sounded near the forest. One of the boys had seen a lion. His whereabouts was discovered after much beating back and forth. I got my camera ready as before at the place the boys thought the fight would take place, but the lion did not do his part. He broke in a different direction and another bunch of spearmen got him two hundred yards away. It was so exasperating to have something prevent this most exciting of all movie photography from succeeding that I almost failed to appreciate the courage and skill of the spearmen.

A few days later, soon after our start in the morning, Mrs. Akeley and I were riding ahead of the procession when we met several lions coming out of the grass and bush near a small stream. The spearmen immediately surrounded the bush into which the lions plunged. The lions tried to escape, but in whatever direction any lion tried to go a spearman bobbed up out of the grass in front of him. That is a simple statement, but to jump up in front of a lion or three lions with nothing but a spear and shield as protection is a thing not to be taken lightly. As the lions sought one escape after another, and found each closed, they fought it out. There was about ten minutes of pandemonium. Then we took stock. Three dead lions gathered together in a pile; pretty authentic reports that two others escaped—and not a picture.

At the next spearing, however, I did get two pictures. We were riding along early in the morning through a rough bush country. All at once I heard a lion grunt. The gun boy held up his hand as a signal to stop. The camera was rushed forward to the bank of a little ravine, but before it was assembled ready for the operation a lioness came up within ten feet of the camera, turned to the left, and then ran back by the same route. The boys waved to me to come down twenty-five yards. There, from a little knoll, we got the first movie record of lion spearing. A young, full-grown lion was at bay in tall grass at the bottom of the ravine. The camera trained on the place caught the first spear thrown. The first one was followed by a shower of spears, and a few seconds later the boys rushed in and got their spears. It was all over quicker than it takes to tell it. In the film not only do the falling spears show but also the movement of the lion in the grass, but the cover and a dark day made any part of the film impossible to use as a still picture. Hardly had I finished turning the handle on this scene when I was called off twenty-five yards to another lion at bay. He was held for the camera and a similar record of this one was made. In the meantime, a lone spearman making desperate effort to get into the show stumbled on an old lioness. They fought it out, man and beast together. When we discovered him he was on his back protecting himself with his shield, a single bite in his leg and the lioness dying beside him. He had killed a lioness practically alone, which entitled him to wear a lion's skin headdress.

On this trip of twenty days we had three occasions in which the spearmen rounded up five lions in a bunch and each time they got three of the five. Altogether, we got ten lions and five leopards. One boy was mauled by a leopard, another was bitten on the leg by the lion. These were the only injuries to the men. Not a shot was fired during the twenty days. Our last encounter involved five old lions, three of which were speared, and three cubs captured alive—but no pictures. It happened like this:

Three lions going up a slope, signal given, pandemonium turned loose. Movements of men looked as if the lions had gone over the hill beyond to a dry stream bed. With the heavy camera I ran down the foot of the hill when I was called back and had to run back to the top of the hill where the lion was at bay. He might have been held indefinitely there in the open sunlight—a wonderful chance for a picture. But in spite of long teaching, of threats, promises, and urging, the boys' excitement overcame them. The spears began to fly before the camera was ready. As I was adjusting the camera the lion was speared in full view in the open sunlight. A camera man never had such a chance before, but it was lost because the camera was slow. After the planning, the care, the work—the luck to have it go like this was too much, and my instinct was to grab my gun and shoot the man who threw the first spear. I think it was the most heartbreaking failure I ever had. I intended never to have another, and from that minute I began working on a camera that takes no time to adjust. I got it finally, but that one moment of poignant disappointment cost me many months of toil.

Here is the way I see this lion spearing. A naked savage gets iron ore, then he gets fire from two sticks, and then charcoal. Then he makes a retort of clay in which he smelts the iron ore. With a hunk of granite for an anvil and another for a hammer he rough forges the spear. With soft iron hammers forged in a similar way he finishes the spear which is finally sharpened on native stones. With this equipment he starts out to kill the lion that has been preying on his flocks or herds. He takes a great pride in the achievement, for he will make from the mane a headdress which his exploit entitles him to wear. Of course this does not happen just this way now, but the Nandi's spearmen speared lions with the arms they made before the white men came. It is a fair contest between man and beast. And the courage and skill of these men are wonderful.

Paul Rainey had a ranch on the west shore of Lake Naivasha. One morning his boys reported to him that a lion had invaded the kraal the night before. He set out on horseback with a few of his dogs and two Masai herd boys with their spears. The dogs soon took up the spoor of the lion and brought him to bay under an acacia tree on the grassy plain. The sun had just risen above the hills on the other side of the lake. The long shadows of the table-top acacias lay across the plain, the lion underneath in full sunlight. Rainey jumped off his horse, threw the reins over a bush, and grabbed his rifle from its boot. He then saw the two Masai boys run on toward the lion. As they approached the lion, one threw his spear and missed. They were between him and the lion, and he could not shoot. The boys stood stock still till the lion was in mid-air in his final spring when the one with the spear stepped to one side and thrust his spear into the lion's neck killing him instantly. He fell at their feet. As the boy withdrew the spear and carefully wiped the blood off on the corner of his breechcloth he remarked to Rainey:

"You see, Master, it is work for a child."

That is how the Masai figured it. But I never have felt so. The first wild lion I ever saw scared me almost to death, and a good many of them have scared me since. The first lions that I saw were in Somaliland.

An oryx hunt had just come to a close. We were about to mount our ponies when one of the black boys pointed. There were three lions walking quietly across a patch of hard, dry sand. They were perhaps a hundred yards away. They looked as big as oxen to me. I had never before seen a lion outside of a cage. We turned our ponies over to the Somali gun boys who galloped after them to round them up. My next view of the lions was when the beaters had gone in to drive them out of a bit of jungle. A roar came from immediately in front of me and I saw a lioness in mid-air as high as my head, springing, thank heaven, diagonally away from me. But she saw me as she sprang and landed facing me. As I fired, a lion jumped over her back, which so disconcerted me that my shot only wounded her. This lion disconcerted her, too, for she followed him. Two more shots at her and she disappeared in another clump of cover with the lions. In our efforts to drive them out of this cover we finally set it on fire. The two lions rushed out and escaped us. The lioness, more seriously wounded than I thought, never came. I had failed to get a lion, but I felt satisfied none the less, because the lions had likewise failed to get me. That one moment in that day, when I saw the lioness in the air, I'll never forget, for I realized that death was but an instant away.

From that time until now I have seen a great many lions, shot some, and handled nearly fifty specimens, so that I have made a fairly extended study of the measurements and anatomy of the king of beasts. I have tried also to study his living characteristics and habits, but that is much more difficult. After all, perhaps the most impressive thing about a lion is his foreleg. The more you know of elephants the more you regard the elephant's trunk. The more you know of lions, the more you respect the lion's foreleg and the great padded and clawed weapon at the end of it. It is perhaps the best token of the animal's strength. It is probably two or three times as powerful in proportion to weight as the arm of a man. He can kill a man with one blow of his paw. His other weapon, his jaw, is strong enough to break a zebra's neck at one bite. These are a rather rough measure of an animal's strength, but they give some idea of it.

There is a record which says that a lion has dragged an African buffalo fifty yards. A buffalo weighs at least three times as much as a lion. I have never had evidence of this much "pulling power" but I have known of many instances of lions dragging zebras that far, and the zebras weigh nearly twice as much as the lions do.

Another test of a lion's strength is his ability to stand punishment. I have seen a lion charge with seven lead bullets from an old .577 Express rifle through his shoulder, and only finally succumb to the eighth bullet in his head.

L. J. Tarlton, one of the best shots that has ever hunted game in Africa, told me once, when we were both recuperating from sickness, that he was going to quit shooting lions. What had brought him to this conclusion was an experience which he had just had with a charging lioness. He had hit her three times in the chest. She finally died touching his feet. When he examined her, all three bullets were within a three-inch radius and every one should have been fatal. Yet she had almost reached him despite his fast and accurate shooting.

These instances are exceptions, but often in African hunting the exceptions are about as common as the rule and one exception may be enough to end the story.

My nearest approach to being mauled by a lion came from this same capacity of a lion to carry lead, and from my own carelessness. I had seen a lion standing some little distance away from me clearly in view, and had shot him. The bullet knocked him down and, as I thought, hurt him badly. After a while he got up and came my way. When about forty yards away he gave me another clear shot. So without reloading the first barrel of my double-barrelled rifle I fired the second. I hit him again, but not with the desired result. He charged. There I was with an empty gun to meet the charge of a wounded lion, and with no one else, not even a gun boy, near. All the rules of lion hunting say that you must meet a charge without moving. But all the promptings of instinct were to move, and I moved. I slipped to one side behind a clump of high grass as fast as I could, endeavouring meanwhile to reload. A few seconds after I had left the spot where I should have stood the lion's spring landed him directly on it. He had had to come through a little depression, and this and the long grass had obscured his sight so he had not seen me move. Not landing on me as he expected so disconcerted him that, even though he saw me, he dived into the thick bushes right ahead of him instead of coming at me. There he stopped, threatening for a time to repeat his charge. Finally, changing his mind, he headed deeper into the brush and, as it was too thick to follow him, I let him go. In the mix-up my syce had become so completely frightened that he had jumped into the river, so he was quite unable to tell whether the lion had got my pony or the pony had run away. After a certain amount of fruitless searching I walked the ten miles back to camp.

The usual movement of a lion is a walk or a kind of fox trot. At speed he will still continue to trot except at maximum effort, when he gallops.

Lions do not usually have any habitation; but occasionally they live in caves. When I say live, I do not mean that they inhabit them continuously. They roam about, following the movements of the game. If they happen to be working in a country where there is a cave, they will use it while in the neighbourhood. But a given band of lions usually stays in one place only a short time. The phrase "band of lions" is perhaps not very accurate. Lions go in all kinds of combinations of numbers. There is a cave on the MacMillan ranch near Nairobi from which sixteen lions have been seen to come. Personally I have never seen more than eight lions together, but I have seen almost all combinations of numbers, ages, and sexes below that number. Lions are more often in twos, threes, or fours than in other combinations.

But although I know that lions are accustomed to roam after game, one of the most interesting lion encounters I ever had came from acting on exactly the opposite theory.

There is a place where a little stream flows into the Theba River, where, in 1906, I was looking for buffalo and heard the snarling of two lions. We stopped the buffalo hunt momentarily to locate the lions. We started at the river bank to drive up the small stream toward the higher land and the open. The beaters began their work with their usual noises, which I checked as soon as possible for fear that the lions would go out too far ahead of us to get a shot. I instructed the beaters to go up the little stream with the cover along its banks throwing stones in ahead of them. But my precautions were too late. They had hardly started to work when I noticed on the hills a lion and a lioness—one going to the left and the other to the right. They were in the open. The lion disappeared over the crest of the first hill. I had a theory that he would lie down on the top of that crest and watch us. I accordingly left part of the men in sight while I, with a few others, approached the hill under cover. I finally succeeded in getting to a point behind a pile of rocks. Motioning the men to stay quiet and keep back, I carefully poked my head up and saw the old fellow as he lay looking toward me about seventy-five yards away. I drew back, and then to my disgust one of my companions rose up in full view of the lion, who made off unscathed by the hurried shots I fired at him. This lion stayed constantly in my mind.

Three years later I was camped on the Tana River with Mrs. Akeley, John McCutcheon, and Fred Stephenson. When we decided to march from the Tana to the Theba I told the crowd that I was going by the spot where I had lost the big lion three years before. I had a "hunch" that he would still be there—or perhaps be revisiting the spot as I was. Anyway, the feeling was strong enough to make me go. Stephenson went off on an independent hunt. The others with the safari came with me. We loitered along photographing rhinoceroses until we came in sight of my spot—the place where the little stream emptied into the Theba. I noticed that Stephenson was coming toward us and about to cross the little stream. I remarked, "Fred is going to drive our lions out and never know it." I then felt a little foolish but nevertheless watched him go through my pet lion bed. Only a few minutes later McCutcheon pointed toward the upper end of the stream and said:

"What is that?"

"My pair of lions," I answered.

They were going up the hill exactly as they had three years before except this time they did not separate. We watched them to the top of the hill. We started out to head them off. As we reached the top of the hill to one side of where they had gone, we heard a lion grunt behind us. There, about a hundred and twenty-five yards away, were the lion and lioness apparently in a very nasty humour. We all crouched down, and as we did so the lions rose up to see us. I said to Mrs. Akeley:

"Shoot whenever you are ready."

I was pretty nervous, for a couple of mad lions in the grass make a very bad outlook.

She fired and missed clean. The lioness began lashing her flanks. Mrs. Akeley fired again. The lion fell dead with a bullet through his brain.

McCutcheon and I urged each other to shoot the lioness, who, in the meantime, bolted and got away. I have handled nearly fifty lions, but this one that Mrs. Akeley killed was the largest of all and he had a good yellow mane. I can't prove that it was the same pair I had seen three years before. What we know of lions is against it, but I still like to think it was. This was Mrs. Akeley's first lion—a splendid trophy, cleanly killed.

CHAPTER IV HUNTING THE AFRICAN BUFFALO

The buffalo is different from any other kind of animal in Africa. A lion prefers not to fight a man. He almost never attacks unprovoked, and even when he does attack he is not vindictive. The elephant, like the lion, prefers to be left alone. But he is quicker to attack than the lion and he isn't satisfied merely to knock out his man enemy. Complete destruction is his aim. The buffalo is even quicker than the elephant to take offence at man and he is as keen-sighted, clever, and vindictive as the elephant. As a matter of fact, the domesticated bull is more likely to attack man without provocation than any wild animal I know, and those who wandered on foot around the bulls on our Western prairies in the old cattle days probably experienced the same kind of charges one gets from African buffaloes.

Nevertheless, despite all these qualities, which are almost universally attributed to the African buffalo, I am confident that the buffalo, like the elephant and other wild animals, has no instinctive enmity to man. That enmity, I am sure, is acquired by experience. I had an experience on the Aberdare Plateau with a band of elephants that had seen little or nothing of man, and until they learned about men from me they paid no more attention to me than if I had been an antelope. But after I had shot one or two as specimens, they acquired the traditional elephant attitude. I had a curiously similar experience with buffaloes.

It happened in this way. Mrs. Akeley, Cuninghame, the famous hunter, and I had been trying for some time, but with little luck, to get buffalo specimens for a group for the Field Museum at Chicago.

We had reason to believe that there was a herd of buffaloes living in the triangle made by the junction of the Theba and Tana rivers. As the buffaloes would have to water from one stream or the other, we felt pretty sure of locating them by following down the Theba to the junction and then up the Tana.

From the swamp down the Theba to its junction with the Tana occupied three days in which we saw no fresh signs of buffalo. On the second march up the Tana, as I was travelling ahead of the safari at about midday, looking out through an opening in a strip of thorn bush that bordered the river, I saw in the distance a great black mass on the open plain which, on further investigation with the field glasses, I was reasonably certain was a herd of buffaloes. Sending a note back to Cuninghame, who was in charge of the safari, suggesting that he make camp at a hill on the banks of the Tana about two miles ahead of my position and await me there, I started off over the plain with my two gun boys. Coming up out of a dry stream-bed that I had used to conceal my approach, I came on to a large herd of eland, and my first fear was that I had mistaken eland for buffaloes.

Going farther on, however, we saw a herd of about five hundred buffaloes lying up in a few scattered thorn trees four or five hundred yards away. At first it seemed an almost impossible situation. There was practically no cover and no means of escape in case the herd detected us and saw fit to charge, and at that time my respect for the buffaloes led me to be extremely cautious. We worked around the herd trying to find some place where a safe approach might be made. Finally, seeing a little band of a dozen buffaloes off at one side on the bank of a ravine which offered splendid protection, we stalked them but, unfortunately, not one in the band was desirable as a specimen. Since this was so, I tried them out, giving them my wind, then going up where they could see me better. I found that they were quite indifferent either to the scent or the sight of man. They finally moved off quietly without alarm. I then knew that this herd, like the Aberdare elephants, had had little or no experience with men, and that there was perhaps less to fear from them than from the traditional buffalo of the sportsman. So going back to the main herd, I crept up boldly to within a hundred yards of them. They saw me, faced about, closely inspecting me, but with no sign of alarm. It was approaching dusk, and in this great black mass it was difficult to pick out a good pair of horns except with the aid of glasses. I carefully located a fine bull and then shot, as I supposed, at the one I had located. As I fired, the animals bolted, first away, then back toward me. They wheeled, ran halfway between the dead animal and me, and passing on about a hundred yards to the right wheeled about again and stood watching me, the bulls in the front, lined up like soldiers, the calves and cows in the background. On coming up to the dead animal, I found, much to my regret, that I had shot a cow and not the bull I had picked out through the glasses.

I returned to camp feeling that now at last, from this herd living apparently in the open, we should have relatively little difficulty in completing our series of specimens. On the following morning, much to our disappointment, our first glimpse of the herd was just as it disappeared in the thorn bush along the bank of the river. We put in nearly a week of hard work to complete the series.

During those seven days of continual hunting, that herd which had been indifferent and unsuspecting at the beginning, like the elephants, became cautious, vigilant, and aggressive. For instance, on one occasion near the close of the week, after having spent the day trying to locate the herd, I suddenly came face to face with them just at the edge of the bush at night on my way back to camp. They were tearing along at a good pace, apparently having been alarmed. I stepped to one side and crouched in the low grass while they passed me in a cloud of dust at twenty-five or thirty yards. Even had I been able to pick out desirable specimens at this time I should have been afraid to shoot for fear of getting into difficulties when they had located my position. I turned and followed them rapidly as they sped away over the hard ground until the noise of their stampede suddenly stopped. I then decided that it was best to get to some point of vantage and await further developments. I climbed an acacia tree that enabled me to look over the top of the bush. Fifty yards ahead I could see about fifty buffaloes lined up in a little open patch looking back on their trail. As I was perched in the tree endeavouring to pick out a desirable animal, I suddenly discovered a lone old bull buffalo coming from the bush almost directly underneath me, sniffing and snuffing this way and that. Very slowly, very cautiously he passed around the tree, then back to the waiting herd, when they all resumed their stampede and made good their escape for the day.

One morning I came in sight of the herd just as it was entering the thorn bush and followed hurriedly on the trail, until just at the edge of the jungle I happened to catch sight of the two black hoofs of an old cow behind the low-hanging foliage. I stopped, expecting a charge. After a few moments I backed slowly away until I reached a tree where I halted to await developments. Stooping down I could see the buffalo's nose and black, beady eyes as she stood motionless. The rest of the herd had gone on out of hearing and I think she was quite alone in her proposed attack. After a few moments, apparently realizing that her plan had failed, she turned about and followed the herd, moving very quietly at first, then breaking into a gallop.

On the following day toward evening we came up again with the herd in the same region. As we first saw them they were too far away for us to choose and shoot with certainty. We managed to crawl to a fair-sized tree midway between us and the herd, and from the deep branches picked out the young herd bull of the group. When we had shot and he had disappeared into the bush, a calf accompanied by its mother gave us a fleeting glimpse of itself, with the result that we added the calf to our series.

The herd disappeared into the bush and after a few minutes we descended from our perch and inspected the calf, then started off in the direction the wounded bull had taken, and found him lying dead just a few yards away.

This completed the series, much to our great joy, for by this time we were thoroughly tired of buffalo-hunting. It had been a long, hard hunt, and our safari as well as ourselves were considerably the worse for wear. To shoot a half-dozen buffaloes is a very simple matter and ought to be accomplished almost any day in British East Africa or Uganda, but to select a series of a half dozen that will have the greatest possible scientific value by illustrating the development from babyhood to old age is quite a different matter.

These buffaloes of the Tana country that we found on the plains and in the bush apparently rarely or never go into the swamps, a fact not only confirmed by observation but also indicated by the condition of the hoofs. These are horny, round, and smooth as a result of travelling on the hard and more or less stony ground of the region. But the tinga-tinga buffaloes have lived in the swamp for years and spend practically no time on hard ground; hence the hoofs are long, sharp, and unworn as a result of walking always in the soft mud and water. All this despite the fact that these two herds may actually come in contact at the edge of the swamp. Other herds live in forest country but come out into the grasslands to feed at night, always going back into the forest at daybreak.

In Uganda, where buffaloes are recognized as a menace to life and are of no particular value except for food, they are officially treated as vermin and one may shoot as many as he will. Here the herds had increased to an enormous extent and, because of the dense jungles and general inaccessibility of the country, it was rather difficult to hunt them. While elephant-hunting in Uganda we found the buffaloes a decided nuisance, frequently coming on to them unexpectedly while hot on an elephant trail, sometimes having difficulty in getting rid of them, not wishing to shoot or stampede them because of the danger of frightening away the elephants, to say nothing of the constant menace of running into a truculent old bull at very close quarters in dense jungle. The buffaloes actually mingle with the elephants, each quite indifferent to the other excepting that on one occasion we found elephant calves charging into a herd of buffaloes, evidently only in play. They chased about squealing and stampeding the buffaloes, who kept at a safe distance but did not actually take alarm. Occasionally an old cow whose calf was being hard-pressed by the young elephants would turn, apparently with the intention of having it out, but would always bolt before the elephant could actually reach her. Despite the fact that the record head, fifty-four inches in spread, was shot by Mr. Knowles in Uganda, from our general observation the heads in Uganda run smaller than those of British East Africa while the animals are perhaps heavier.

Although in our buffalo-hunting we have never had any actually serious encounters, I fully appreciate that the buffalo deserves his reputation as one of the most dangerous of big-game animals. His eyesight is good, he has keen scent, and is vigilant and vindictive. While the lion is usually satisfied with giving his victim a knock-out blow or bite, the buffalo, when once on the trail of man, will not only persist in his efforts to find him but, when he has once come up with him, will not leave while there is a vestige of life remaining in the victim. In some cases he will not leave while there is a fragment of the man remaining large enough to form a target for a buffalo's stamping hoofs.

A hunter I met once told me of an experience he had with a buffalo which shows in rather a terrible way these characteristics of the animal. He and a companion wounded a buffalo and followed it into the long grass. It was lurking where they did not expect it and with a sudden charge it was upon them before they had a chance to shoot. The buffalo knocked down the man who told me the story and then rushed after his companion. The first victim managed to climb a tree although without his gun. By that time the other man was dead. But the buffalo was not satisfied. For two hours he stamped and tossed the remains while the wounded man in the tree sat helplessly watching. When the buffalo left, my informant told me, the only evidence of his friend was the trampled place on the ground where the tragedy had taken place. There is nothing in Africa more vindictive than this.

There was another case of an old elephant hunter in Uganda who shot a buffalo for meat. The bullet did not kill the animal and it retreated into the thick bush where there were even some good-sized trees. The old hunter followed along a path. Suddenly the buffalo caught him and tossed him. As he went into the air he grasped some branches overhanging the trail. There he hung unable to get up and afraid to drop down while the wild bull beneath him charged back and forth with his long horns ripping at the hunter's legs. Happily the gun boy came up in time to save his master by killing the beast. This hunter was an extraordinary character. He was very successful and yet he was almost stone deaf. How he dared hunt elephants or any other big game without the aid of his hearing I have never been able to conceive, yet he did it and did it well.

One morning Cuninghame, having gone out with some boys to shoot meat for camp, came upon three old buffaloes. He sent a runner back to camp with the news, and Mrs. Akeley and I started out to join him. Halfway from camp we were obliged to make a wide detour to avoid an old rhino and calf, but soon caught up with Cuninghame. He reported, however, that the buffaloes had passed on into some dense bush. We started to follow but suddenly came upon two rhinos. We quickly turned to leeward in order not to disturb them by giving them our wind, for we were not anxious to bring on a general stampede of the game in the neighbourhood. This turn brought us to the windward of the old cow and calf that we had first avoided, with the result that she came charging up, followed by the calf close at her heels, snorting like a locomotive. Cuninghame helped Mrs. Akeley up a convenient tree. He stood at the base of the tree and I at the foot of another where we waited with our guns ready, watching the old cow go tearing past within twenty feet of us.

We continued on the buffalo trail, but the stampede of the rhino had resulted in alarming the buffaloes so that instead of finding them near by, we were forced to follow them for an hour or more before again coming in sight of them; and again twice more they were stampeded by rhinos that happened to get in our path. At last the buffaloes evidently became tired of being chased from place to place, and came to rest on a sloping hillside which we could approach only by crawling on our hands and knees in the grass for a considerable distance. In this manœuvring it happened that Mrs. Akeley was able to stalk the best bull, and a few minutes later he was finished off and we were busy photographing, measuring, and preparing the skin.

About twenty-five miles to the northwest from the Tana, across the plain on the Theba River, is a marsh where a herd of nearly a hundred buffaloes was known to live, but the Provincial Commissioner had definitely said that we were not to shoot these. We decided finally to ask for the privilege, which was granted, but with a warning in the form of an explanation: that he had told us not to shoot there because of the danger involved.

We found a reed marsh about one by two miles in extent with, at that time, a foot or two of water in the buffalo trails that crisscrossed it in all directions. On arriving, and while making camp at one end of the marsh just at dusk, we saw the herd come out on dry land a half mile away—but they returned to cover before we could approach them. In fact, during nearly two weeks that we spent there we saw them come outside the swamp only twice, each time to return immediately.

We made several attempts to approach them in the marsh, but found that while it was quite possible to get up to them it was out of the question to choose our specimens. Also it would have been impossible to beat a retreat in case of a charge or stampede; so we adopted a campaign of watchful waiting. From the camp at daybreak we would scan the marsh for the snowy cow herons that were always with the buffaloes during the daytime. These would fly about above the reeds from one part of the herd to another, and at times, where the reeds were low, they could be seen riding along perched on the backs of the animals. Having thus located the herd and determined the general direction of its movements, we would go to a point at the edge of the marsh where it seemed likely that the animals would come out, or at least come near enough to be visible in the shorter reeds. It was in this way that we secured the specimen that makes the young bull of the group—and two weeks spent there resulted in securing no other specimen. On this one occasion the buffaloes, accompanied by the white herons, had come to within about a hundred yards of our position on the shores of the swamp. They were in reeds that practically concealed them, but the young buffalo in question, in the act of throwing up his head to dislodge a bird that had irritated him, disclosed a pair of horns that indicated a young bull of the type I wanted. A heron standing on his withers gave me his position, and aiming about two feet below the bird, I succeeded in killing the bull with a heart shot.

CHAPTER V LEOPARDS AND RHINOS

There is a general belief firmly fixed in the popular mind by constant repetition that the ostrich is a very stupid bird. A man might well expect easy hunting of a bird that tried to hide by the traditional method of sticking its head in the sand. But I found that the ostrich, like other African animals, did not always realize its obligation to tradition or abide by the rules set down for its behaviour. I went a long way into the waterless desert of Somaliland after ostriches. We were just across the Haud and were camped in a "tug" or dry stream bed where by digging we could get water for our sixty men and the camels. During two days of hunting in the dry bush of this desert I had seen many ostriches, but none of them had put its head into the ground and left its big black-and-white plumed body for me to shoot at. On the contrary, in this my first experience with them I found them exceedingly wary. They kept their bodies hidden behind the bush. Only their heads were exposed, each head only about large enough to carry a pair of very keen eyes and much too small to serve as a target at the distance that they maintained. As a result of being continually outwitted by them for two days I began to think ill of the man who originally started the story about their stupidity.

With the difficulties of the chase firmly in mind I set out early on the third day to see if I could get a specimen. Concluding that the smaller the party the better the opportunity, I took only a mule and my pony boy. When only a half mile from camp I met an old hyena who was loafing along after a night out. He looked like a good specimen, but after I shot him, one look at his dead carcass was enough to satisfy me that he was not as desirable as I had thought, for his skin was badly diseased. I had very good reason to think of this very hard later in the day. A little farther along I shot a good wart hog for our scientific collection. Leaving the specimen where it lay, I marked the spot and continued in search of the plume-bearers.

Soon after this I climbed to the top of a termite hill about eight feet high to look the country over with field glasses. As I held the glasses to my eyes while adjusting the focus, I suddenly realized that the letter S that I was focussing on was the head and neck of an ostrich and that there was a second letter S beside it. The birds remained perfectly motionless watching and I did likewise, locating their position meanwhile by the termite hills which were nearly in line between us. Suddenly the heads ducked and disappeared behind the bush. I dropped from my perch and ran rapidly to where they had been, but found only their trail in the sand.

When I had given up tracking them and was about to start farther afield I came into an opening in the bush that was about thirty yards wide and two hundred yards long. Near the centre of the opening was a dense green bush a dozen feet in diameter. A beautiful cock ostrich broke into the clearing at full speed just below the bush and as I raised my rifle he disappeared behind the bush. I held ready to catch him as he passed out from behind it on the other side, where there was fifteen or twenty yards of clear ground before he would reach cover again. I stood there ready with my gun up until I felt foolish. Then I ran quickly to the bush expecting to find him just on the other side. He was nowhere in sight, but his trail told the story. As he had come into the open he had seen me and when behind the bush he had stopped short, as indicated by a great hole and swirl of sand where he had caught himself by one foot, had turned at right angles and run straight away the length of the clearing, keeping the bush between himself and his enemy. I have not known many animals to do a more clever thing than this. I got one shot at him later—putting my sights at three hundred yards—but the bullet struck in the sand between his legs.

We returned to camp later in the afternoon and after a little rest and refreshment I started out again with only the pony boy and carrying the necessary tools to get the head of the wart hog that I had shot in the morning. We had no difficulty in finding the place where I had shot him, but there was nothing to be seen of the pig. The place was strewn with vulture features, but surely vultures could not make away with the head. A crash in the bushes at one side led me in a hurry in that direction and a little later I saw my pig's head in the mouth of a hyena travelling up the slope of a ridge out of range. That meant that my wart hog specimen was lost, and, having got no ostriches, I felt it was a pretty poor day.

The sun was setting, and with little to console us the pony boy and I started for camp. As we came near to the place where I had shot the diseased hyena in the morning, it occurred to me that perhaps there might be another hyena about the carcass, and feeling a bit "sore" at the tribe for stealing my wart hog, I thought I might pay off the score by getting a good specimen of a hyena for the collections. The pony boy led me to the spot, but the dead hyena was nowhere in sight. There was the blood where he had fallen, and in the dusk we could make out a trail in the sand where he had been dragged away.

Advancing a few steps, a slight sound attracted my attention, and glancing to one side I got a glimpse of a shadowy form going behind a bush. I then did a very foolish thing. Without a sight of what I was shooting at, I shot hastily into the bush. The snarl of a leopard told me what kind of a customer I was taking chances with. A leopard is a cat and has all the qualities that gave rise to the "nine lives" legend. To kill him you have got to kill him clear to the tip of his tail. Added to that, a leopard, unlike a lion, is vindictive. A wounded leopard will fight to a finish practically every time, no matter how many chances it has to escape. Once aroused, its determination is fixed on fight, and if a leopard ever gets hold, it claws and bites until its victim is in shreds. All this was in my mind, and I began looking about for the best way out of it, for I had no desire to try conclusions with a possibly wounded leopard when it was so late in the day that I could not see the sights of my rifle. My intention was to leave it until morning and if it had been wounded, there might then be a chance of finding it. I turned to the left to cross to the opposite bank of a deep, narrow tug and when there I found that I was on an island where the tug forked, and by going along a short distance to the point of the island I would be in position to see behind the bush where the leopard had stopped. But what I had started the leopard was intent on finishing. While peering about I detected the beast crossing the tug about twenty yards above me. I again began shooting, although I could not see to aim. However, I could see where the bullets struck as the sand spurted up beyond the leopard. The first two shots went above her, but the third scored. The leopard stopped and I thought she was killed. The pony boy broke into a song of triumph which was promptly cut short by another song such as only a thoroughly angry leopard is capable of making as it charges. For just a flash I was paralyzed with fear, then came power for action. I worked the bolt of my rifle and became conscious that the magazine was empty. At the same instant I realized that a solid point cartridge rested in the palm of my left hand, one that I had intended, as I came up to the dead hyena, to replace with a soft nose. If I could but escape the leopard until I could get the cartridge into the chamber!

The dotted line indicates Mr. Akeley's movement during his encounter
with the leopard. The dashes show the route taken by the leopard. At
position (1), Mr. Akeley fired into the bush. Of the three shots fired at
position (2), two went above the leopard and the third inflicted only a skin
wound. The hand-to-hand combat took place at position (3).

As she came up the bank on one side of the point of the island, I dropped down the other side and ran about to the point from which she had charged, by which time the cartridge was in place, and I wheeled—to face the leopard in mid-air. The rifle was knocked flying and in its place was eighty pounds of frantic cat. Her intention was to sink her teeth into my throat and with this grip and her forepaws hang to me while with her hind claws she dug out my stomach, for this pleasant practice is the way of leopards. However, happily for me, she missed her aim. Instead of getting my throat she was to one side. She struck me high in the chest and caught my upper right arm with her mouth. This not only saved my throat but left her hind legs hanging clear where they could not reach my stomach. With my left hand I caught her throat and tried to wrench my right arm free, but I couldn't do it except little by little. When I got grip enough on her throat to loosen her hold just a little she would catch my arm again an inch or two lower down. In this way I drew the full length of the arm through her mouth inch by inch. I was conscious of no pain, only of the sound of the crushing of tense muscles and the choking, snarling grunts of the beast. As I pushed her farther and farther down my arm I bent over, and finally when it was almost freed I fell to the ground, the leopard underneath me, my right hand in her mouth, my left hand clutching her throat, my knees on her lungs, my elbows in her armpits spreading her front legs apart so that the frantic clawing did nothing more than tear my shirt. Her body was twisted in an effort to get hold of the ground to turn herself, but the loose sand offered no hold. For a moment there was no change in our positions, and then for the first time I began to think and hope I had a chance to win this curious fight. Up to that time it had been simply a good fight in which I expected to lose, but now if I could keep my advantage perhaps the pony boy would come with a knife. I called, but to no effect. I still held her and continued to shove the hand down her throat so hard she could not close her mouth and with the other I gripped her throat in a strangle hold. Then I surged down on her with my knees. To my surprise I felt a rib go. I did it again. I felt her relax, a sort of letting go, although she was still struggling. At the same time I felt myself weakening similarly, and then it became a question as to which would give up first. Little by little her struggling ceased. My strength had outlasted hers.

After what seemed an interminable passage of time I let go and tried to stand, calling to the pony boy that it was finished. He now screwed up his courage sufficiently to approach. Then the leopard began to gasp, and I saw that she might recover; so I asked the boy for his knife. He had thrown it away in his fear, but quickly found it, and I at last made certain that the beast was dead. As I looked at her later I came to the conclusion that what had saved me was the first shot I had fired when she went into the bush. It had hit her right hind foot. I think it was this broken foot which threw out the aim of her spring and made her get my arm instead of my throat. With the excitement of the battle still on me I did not realize how badly used up I was. I tried to shoulder the leopard to carry it to camp, but was very soon satisfied to confine my efforts to getting myself to camp.

When I came inside the zareba, my companions were at dinner before one of the tents. They had heard the shots and had speculated on the probabilities. They had decided that I was in a mix-up with a lion or with natives, but that I would have the enemy or the enemy would have me before they could get to me; so they had continued their dinner. The fatalistic spirit of the country had prevailed. When I came within their range of vision, however, my appearance was quite sufficient to arrest attention, for my clothes were all ripped, my arm was chewed into an unpleasant sight, and there was blood and dirt all over me. Moreover, my demands for all the antiseptics in camp gave them something to do, for nothing was keener in my mind than that the leopard had been feeding on the diseased hyena that I had shot in the morning. To the practical certainty of blood poisoning from any leopard bite not quickly treated was added the certainty that this leopard's mouth was particularly foul with disease. While my companions were getting the surgical appliances ready, my boys were stripping me and dousing me with cold water. That done, the antiseptic was pumped into every one of the innumerable tooth wounds until my arm was so full of the liquid that an injection in one drove it out of another. During the process I nearly regretted that the leopard had not won. But it was applied so quickly and so thoroughly that it was a complete case.

Later in the evening they brought the leopard in and laid it beside my cot. Her right hind foot showed where the first shot had hit her. The only other bullet that struck her was the last before she charged and that had creased her just under the skin on the back of the neck, from the shock of which she had instantly recovered.

MR. AKELEY AND THE LEOPARD HE KILLED BARE HANDED

A LEOPARD SPEARED BY THE NATIVES

This encounter took place fairly soon after our arrival on my first trip to Africa. I have seen a lot of leopards since and occasionally killed one, but I have taken pains never to attempt it at such close quarters again. In spite of their fighting qualities I have never got to like or respect leopards very much. This is not because of my misadventure; I was hurt much worse by an elephant, but I have great respect and admiration for elephants. I think it is because the leopard has always seemed to me a sneaking kind of animal, and also perhaps because he will eat carrion even down to a dead and diseased hyena. A day or two before my experience with the leopard someone else had shot a hyena near our camp and had left him over night. The next morning the dead hyena was lodged fifteen feet from the ground in the crotch of a tree at some distance from where he was killed. A leopard, very possibly my enemy, had dragged him along the ground and up the tree and placed him there for future use. While such activities cannot increase one's respect for the taste of leopards, they do give convincing evidence of the leopard's strength, for the hyena weighed at least as much as the leopard.

The leopard, like the elephant, is at home in every kind of country in East Africa—on the plains, among the rocky hills, among the bamboo, and in the forest all the way up to timber line on the equatorial mountains. Unlike the lion, the leopard is a solitary beast. Except for a mother with young, I have never seen as many as two leopards together. It is my belief that like the lion they do their hunting at night almost exclusively, and I am quite sure that this is their general habit despite the fact that the only unmistakable evidence of day hunting I ever saw myself in Africa was done by a leopard. I was out one day in some tall grass and came upon the body of a small antelope. As I came up I heard an animal retreat and I thought I recognized a leopard's snarl. The antelope was still warm. It had evidently just been killed and the tracks around it were those of a leopard.

One of the leopard's chief sources of food supply consists of monkeys and baboons. I remember a certain camp we had near the bottom of a cliff. Out of this cliff grew a number of fig trees in which the baboons were accustomed to sleep fairly well out of reach of the leopards. They were, however, not completely immune, and we could hear the leopards at the top of the cliff almost every night, and once in a while the remnants of a baboon testified to the success of the leopard's night prowling. Besides monkeys and baboons, leopards seem inordinately fond of dogs. A pack of dogs like Paul Rainey's can make short work of a leopard, but on the other hand a leopard can make short work of a single dog and seemingly takes great pleasure in doing so. One night in a shack in Nyiri, a settler sat talking to his neighbour, while his dog slept under the table. Suddenly, and quite unannounced, a leopard slipped in through the open door. Confusion reigned supreme for a moment and then the men found themselves on the table. The leopard was under the table killing the dog and somehow in the excitement the door had been closed. One after the other the men fled out of the window, leaving the dog to his fate. A traveller had a similar but more painful experience with a leopard at the Dak Bungalow at Voi. Voi is a station on the Uganda Railroad where there was, and I suppose still is, a railroad hotel of a rather primitive kind known as the Dak Bungalow. One night a man was sleeping in one of the Bungalow rooms and, hearing a commotion outside, he started out to see what it was. As he passed through the open doorway on to the porch he was attacked by the leopard that had evidently come stalking his dogs.

Leopards are not particularly afraid of man. I never knew one to attack a man unprovoked except when caught at such close quarters as the case at Voi, but they prowl around man's habitation without compunction. I had a camp in Somaliland once where the tents were surrounded by two thorn thickets—the inner and outer zareba. A leopard came in one night, killed a sheep, dragged it under the very fly of my tent on the way out, jumped the zareba, and got away. Fifteen years ago, when Nairobi was a very small place, the daughter of one of the government officers went into her room one evening to dress. As she opened the door she heard a noise and looking she noticed the end of a leopard's tail sticking out from under the bed with the tip gently moving from side to side. With great presence of mind the young lady quietly went out and closed the door. Nairobi had many possibilities of thrills in those days. It was about the same time that a gentleman hurrying from town up to the Government House one evening met a lion in the middle of the street to the embarrassment of both parties.

There are some phrases in Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" that put me in mind of the rhinoceros, or "rhino," as everyone calls him in Africa.

"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."

But it is stupidity, not duty, that keeps the rhino from reasoning. He is the stupidest old fellow in Africa. I know that many experienced hunters likewise consider him one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. I can't quite agree with this. Of course, if he runs over you not only is it dangerous, but it is also likely to be fatal. It is also true that as soon as he smells man he is likely to start charging around in a most terrifying manner, but the rhino is never cunning like the elephant, nor is his charge accurate like that of a lion, nor is the rhino vindictive like the buffalo or the leopard. Most men's estimates of the relative dangers of African animals are based upon their own experiences. The animals that have mauled them worst or scared them worst they hold most dangerous. I have been mauled by an elephant, chewed by a leopard, and scared half to death a dozen times by lions, so that I have the very firmest convictions about the dangers of these animals. On the other hand, I have twice been caught by rhinos in positions where an elephant, a lion, or a leopard would have had me in no time, and both times the rhinos left me unmolested.

When I first went to Africa I had the same experience as everyone else. Rhinos getting wind of me would charge me and to save myself I'd shoot. I suppose I had stood off twenty of these charges with my rifle before I discovered that if I did not shoot it would not necessarily be fatal. I discovered the fact, of course, quite by accident. I was going along the bank of the Tana River one day with my camera. My gun boys were some distance behind so as not to disturb any animal that might afford a picture. Suddenly I was set all a-quiver by the threshings and snortings of a rhino coming through the bushes in my direction. I very hastily took stock of the situation. There was nothing to climb. Between me and the thicket from which the rhino was coming was about twenty-five feet of open space. Behind me was a 30-foot drop to the crocodile-infested waters of the Tana. The only hope I saw was a bush overhanging the brink which looked as if it might or might not hold me if I swung out on it. I decided to try the bush and let the rhino land in the river, trusting to luck that I wouldn't join him there. The bushes were thrust aside and he came full tilt into the opening where he could see me. Everything was set for the final act. He suddenly stopped with a snort. His head drooped. His eyes almost closed. He looked as if he were going to sleep. The terrible beast had become absolutely ludicrous. While this was going on I felt a poke in my back. I reached behind and took my rifle from the gun boy who had come up with equal celerity and bravery. I drew a bead on the old fellow but I could not shoot. A stupider or more ludicrous looking object I never saw. I began talking to him, but it did not rouse him from his lethargy. There he stood, half asleep and totally oblivious, while I, with the gun half aimed, talked to him about his ugly self. About this time my porters came into hearing on a path behind the rhino. He pricked up his ears and blundered off in that direction. I heard the loads dropping as the porters made for the trees. The rhino charged through the safari and off into the bush.

At another time, somewhat later, three of them charged me when I was sitting down and unarmed. I couldn't rise in time to get away or reach a gun, so I merely continued to sit. This time they didn't stop and doze, but they went by on both sides ten or fifteen feet away. Such a charge was much more pleasing to me and apparently quite as satisfactory to them as one in which they were successful in their attack. These experiences have led me to think that in his blundering charges the rhino has no clear objective, as a lion has, for instance. Even his blundering charge is dangerous, of course, if you are in the way, but I firmly believe that the rhino is too stupid to be either accurate in his objective, fixed in his purpose, or vindictive in his intentions.

This does not mean that a lot of people have not been killed by rhinos. They have; but I do believe that compared with other African animals the danger of the rhino is generally exaggerated. When he smells something he comes toward the scent until he sees what it is. As he can't see very far, no man with a gun is likely to let him come within seeing distance without shooting. So the stupid old beast goes charging around hoping to see the source of what he smells and in addition to getting himself shot has made a reputation for savagery. In fact, he has blundered around and been shot so much that old rhinos with big horns are growing scarce.

I remember coming up over the top of a little rise one day and seeing across the plain an old rhino standing motionless in the shade of a solitary acacia about two hundred yards away. The usual tick birds sat on his back. It was a typical rhino pose. As I stood looking for more entertainment, a second rhino came mouching along between me and number one. Number one evidently heard him. The birds flew off his back, he pricked up his ears, and broke into a charge toward number two. Number two reciprocated. Their direction was good and they had attained full speed. I longed for a camera to photograph the collision. But the camera would have done me no good. The collision did not happen. When about twenty feet from each other they stopped dead, snorted, and turned around, number one returning to doze under his tree and number two continuing the journey which had been interrupted. I suppose that rhinos have acquired the habit of charging whenever they smell anything because until the white man came along they could investigate in this peculiar manner with impunity. Everything but an elephant or another rhino would get out of the way of one of these investigating rushes, and of course an elephant or another rhino is big enough for even the rhino's poor eyes to see before he gets into trouble.

The coming of the white man with the rifle upset all this, but the rhino has learned less about protecting himself from man than the other animals. Man went even further in breaking the rules of rhino existence. The railroad was an even worse affront than the rifle. The rhino furnished some of the comedy of the invasion of the game country by the Uganda Railway. In the early days of that road a friend of mine was on the train one day when a rhino charged it. The train was standing still out in the middle of the plain. An old rhino, either hearing it or smelling man, set out on the customary charge. The train didn't move and he didn't swerve. He hit the running board of one car at full speed. There was a terrific jolt. My friend rushed to the platform. As he reached it the rhino was getting up off his knees. He seemed a little groggy but he trotted off, conscious, perhaps, that railroad trains cannot be routed by the rhino's traditional method of attack.

CHAPTER VI ALONG THE TRAIL

"The land teems with the beasts of the chase, infinite in number and incredible in variety. It holds the fiercest beasts of ravin, and the fleetest and most timid of those beings that live in undying fear of talon and fang. It holds the largest and the smallest of hoofed animals. It holds the mightiest creatures that tread the earth or swim in its rivers; it also holds distant kinsfolk of these same creatures, no bigger than woodchucks, which dwell in crannies of the rocks and in tree tops. There are antelope smaller than hares and antelope larger than oxen. There are creatures which are the embodiments of grace, and others whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare. The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose like is not known elsewhere; and with others even stranger that show both in form and temper something of the fantastic and the grotesque."

So Theodore Roosevelt, in that vivid word picture of jungle sights and sounds, the foreword of "African Game Trails," suggests the vast variety of animal acquaintances the hunter may make in Africa. I have sought out or happened upon many others besides my particular friends, the elephants and gorillas.

One of those whose "huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare" is the hippopotamus. The small dugout in which the native makes his way up and down the Tana River is just a nice mouthful for him. He can splinter one between his great jaws in no time if he is sufficiently stirred up, but fortunately for the natives he is not easily enraged. He is more or less like the rhinoceros except that, while he is equally stupid, he rarely gets mad and so is not often dangerous.

Along the Tana River in 1906 the hippos were still very abundant, and I presume that a hunter passing along that stream to-day might shoot all he could possibly want. Although I saw probably only a small proportion of all I actually passed, I counted more than two hundred in a ten-mile march along the Tana. Sheltered by the rather high and precipitous banks of the river, the hippopotami if undisturbed bask quietly on the sand-bars during the day. If one is disturbed, he takes to the water, leaving exposed only the top of his head, his eyes, and nostrils, so that if he remains motionless one usually has to spend some time to determine whether the object protruding from the water is a hippo's head or a slate-coloured rock. If really frightened, he submerges entirely, exposing only his nostrils and those just long enough to blow and take in a fresh supply of air. Then down he goes, not to appear again for several minutes, frequently in quite a different place.

Cuninghame and I had a good opportunity to test his disposition one day as we were crossing Lake Naivasha. I was sitting at the tiller in the stern of the boat about half asleep in the hot sun of midday when there was a sudden explosion and our boat was lifted well out of the water. The keel had struck the back of a submerged hippopotamus. He came up thirty yards away with his mouth open, but he made no attempt to attack. We had the good luck to come down right side up, shipping only a little water. I hope he was as badly frightened as I was.

Because he is so little sport, even the pot hunters have left the hippo alone. However, most of the African tribes consider hippopotamus meat good eating and he is frequently killed by the natives for food. The fact is that in times of famine this animal is a valuable source of supply. In 1906, when we were on the Tana River, I found a bone yard with the bones of a great number of hippopotami along with various human bones. In a famine some fifteen or twenty years earlier, so the story goes, the natives had gravitated toward the Tana River to kill hippopotami to keep from starving and there had fought over this last source of food.

Double rows of tracks with grass growing between them, like those made by a wagon, trail along the Tana and are cut deep into the river's banks, where through long years the hippos have come up at night to graze and browse. His is a double track, because in travelling he does not place one foot before the other. He finds no food in the water, but he is at home there, and sometimes travels long distances overland from one pool or stream to another. How far he treks in this way I do not know, and the question is much disputed. I am certain that it is sometimes as much as fifty miles.

While I have found but little enjoyment in shooting any kind of animal, I confess that in hunting elephants and lions under certain conditions I have always felt that the animal had sufficient chance in the game to make it something like a sporting proposition. On the other hand, much of the shooting that I have had to do in order to obtain specimens for museum collections has had none of this aspect at all and has made me feel a great deal like a murderer. One of the worst of my experiences was with the wild ass of Somaliland on my first trip to Africa. These animals are rare, and as they are the only members of the horse family in that part of Africa, the Field Museum of Natural History was anxious to get specimens of them.

After several heart-breaking days' work my companion, Dodson, and I had secured but one specimen and several were needed for a group. One day under guidance of natives who promised to take us to a country where they abounded, we started out at three o'clock in the morning, with a couple of camels to bring back the skins if we got them. At about eight, as we were crossing a sandy plain where here and there a dwarfed shrub or tuft of grass had managed to find sustenance, one of the gun-bearers pointed out in the distance an object which he declared to be an ass. We advanced slowly. As there was no cover, there was no possibility of a stalk, and the chance of a shot at reasonable range seemed remote, for we had found in our previous experience that the wild ass is extremely shy and when once alarmed travels rapidly and for long distances. We approached to within two hundred yards and had begun to think that it was a native's tame donkey and expected to see its owner appear in the neighbourhood, when it became uneasy and started to bolt; but its curiosity brought it about for a last look and we took advantage of the opportunity and fired. It was hard hit, apparently, but recovered and stood facing us. We approached closer, and thinking it best to take no chances fired again—and then he merely walked about a little, making no apparent effort to go away. We approached carefully. He showed no signs of fear, and although "hard hit" stood stolidly until at last I put one hand on his withers and, tripping him, pushed him over. I began to feel that if this was sport I should never be a sportsman.

We now discovered that our scant supply of water was exhausted and although we wished to continue the hunt we realized that to get farther from camp without water would be risky indeed. The guide had assured us that there would be plenty of opportunity to get water on our route but we knew that it was five hours back to water, the way we had come, and five hours without water in the middle of the day would mean torture. It is said that in that region thirty hours without water means death to the native and twelve hours is the white man's limit. The guide assured us that if we would continue on an hour longer we would find water. After four hours of hard, hot marching we arrived at a hole in the ground where some time there had been water but not a drop remained. After a little digging at the bottom of the hole the natives declared there was no hope. Our trail for the last hour had been under a pitiless noonday sun along a narrow valley shut in on either side by steep, rocky hills, while we faced a veritable sand storm, a strong, hot wind that drove the burning sand into our faces and hands. The dry well was the last straw.

The guides said there was one more hole about an hour away and they would go and see if there was water there. They with the gun-bearers started out, while we off-saddled the mules and using the saddles for pillows and the saddle blankets to protect our faces from the driving sand, dozed in the scant shade of a leafless thorn tree.

At four o'clock the boys returned—no water. Dodson and I received the report, looked at one another, and returned to our pillows beneath the saddle blankets. A little later a continued prodding in the ribs from my gun-bearer brought me to attention again as he pointed out an approaching caravan consisting of several camels and a couple of natives. Each of the natives carried a well-filled goatskin from his shoulders, and realizing that these goatskins probably contained milk, I knew that our troubles were nearly over. I instructed the gun-bearer to make a bargain for part of the milk and covered my head again to escape the pelting of the sand and waited.

We were both in a semi-comatose state and I paid no further attention to proceedings until I was again prodded by the gun-bearer who was now greatly excited. He pointed to the receding camels while he jabbered away to the effect that the natives would not part with any of the plentiful supply of milk. The white men might die for all they cared.

When I had come to a realization of the situation, there seemed to be only one solution to the affair—a perfectly natural solution—precisely the same as if they had stood over us with their spears poised at our hearts. I grabbed my rifle and drew a bead on one of the departing men and called to Dodson to get up and cover the other. I waited while Dodson was getting to an understanding of the game and then when he was ready and I was about to give the word the natives stopped, gesticulating wildly. The gun-bearer who had been shouting to them told us not to shoot, that the milk would come, and it did. Milk! Originally milked into a dung-lined smoked chattie, soured and carried in a filthy old goatskin for hours in the hot sun. But it was good. I have never had a finer drink.

An hour before sundown, greatly refreshed, we started back to camp. Just at dusk the shadowy forms of five asses dashed across our path fifty yards away and we heard a bullet strike as we took a snap at them. One began to lag behind as the others ran wildly away. The one soon stopped and we approached, keeping him covered in case he attempted to bolt. As we got near he turned and faced us with great, gentle eyes. Without the least sign of fear or anger he seemed to wonder why we had harmed him.

The only wound was from a small bullet high in the neck, merely a flesh wound which would have caused him no serious trouble had he continued with the herd. We walked around him within six feet and I almost believe we could have put a halter on him. Certainly it would have been child's play to have thrown a rope over his head. We reached camp about midnight and I announced that if any more wild asses were wanted, someone else would have to shoot them. I had had quite enough. Normally, the ass is one of the wildest of creatures and it is difficult to explain the actions of these two. They appeared not to realize that we were the cause of their injuries but rather seemed to expect relief as we approached—and yet one English "sportsman" boasted of having killed twenty-eight.

While I have never had a zebra stand after being wounded, in all other respects his habits resemble very closely those of his kin, the wild ass of Somaliland. Occasionally, man has captured and domesticated zebras so that he may use them in a four-horse team. But this is done only for the amusement it affords, because the zebra, like all wild animals, has never quite enough of the endurance that is bred into a domesticated horse to make him useful in harness. In wild life he requires only sufficient stamina to outrun a lion for a short distance.

There is no fun in shooting zebras and wild asses. It makes one uncomfortable. Probably we are particularly thin-skinned when it comes to shooting the members of the horse family because we are used to them, or at least to their kindred, as domesticated friends, but as a matter of fact that is quite as reasonable as to think of killing deer or antelope as a sport. With most deer there is no danger. The only problem is to get close enough for a shot. While an approach may be difficult in some parts of the world—and this is true with certain species of antelope in Africa—most of the plains antelope cannot be shot on the ground of sport. For food and scientific purposes, however, the case is different.

One of the hardest to shoot among the so-called bovine antelopes is the koodoo. He is a beautiful, high-bred animal with clean-cut head and long spiral horns. While almost as large as an elk, he is gracefully built and stylish in action. His coat is gray, delicately marked with white stripes. As the animal matures, the hair becomes short and thin and the stripes fade. All in all, the koodoo is one of the finest big antelope. On that score he has no competitors except the sable and the roan.