30 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
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 com- 
plete 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 ele- 
phant 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 eye- 
sight. The elephant is not afraid of any animal ex- 
cept 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 inter- 
ested in their movements as a hunter. In fact, he 
isn’t normally particularly interested in moving ob- 
jects 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 
