48 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
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, auto- 
matically do what he planned. Anyway, I firmly be- 
lieve 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 ele- 
phant’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 
