ELEPHANT FRIENDS AND FOES 37 
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 ¢rek 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 ex- 
perience 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 
