Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/61

 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