Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/209

 several babies were squealing and pushing each other—having a fine time at play. Sometimes they were ahead of the herd and sometimes behind it, but all the time in a very gay mood. There seemed to be something that they were playing with, but the grass was too high and I was too far off to make out what it was. However, where the trail of the herd finally went into the forest, I discovered the babies' plaything. It was a big dirt ball about two and one half feet in diameter, a fragment of an ant-hill. These ant-hills are made of a mixture of saliva and sand which when baked by the African sun gets almost as hard as brick. A steel-jacketed bullet will be cut all to pieces before penetrating the surface of an ant-hill at all. In some way the baby elephants had got a fragment of an old ant-hill that was nearly round and this they had used as a ball to roll along in their play. It is not so surprising, therefore, that an elephant can be made to do tricks with a ball in the circus!

I am putting the youngsters and their ball into bronze for one group.

The other is called At Bay and represents an elephant with trunk up standing at bay with his hind leg tied to a great log.

One of the native's methods of hunting elephants is to dig a pit in an elephant path, cover the pit over with a "basket"—a kind of trap—put a noose on top of the "basket," and camouflage the whole with grass and leaves. When the trap is set there is no evidence of anything but a plain and safe path. The