256 ELEPHAN T-HUNTTNG [ch. x 



and after standing stock still for a minute or two, 

 Kermit and Tarlton stole quietly off for a hundred 

 yards, and waited until the anger of the cows cooled 

 and they had moved away, before going up to the dead 

 bull. Then they followed the herd again, and Kermit 

 got some photos which, as far as I know, are better 

 than any tliat have ever before been taken of wild 

 elephant. He took them close up, at imminent risk of 

 a charge. 



The following day the two himters rode back to Meru, 

 making a long circle. The elephants they saw were not 

 worth shooting, but they killed the finest rhinoceros we 

 had yet seen. They saw it in an open space of tall 

 grass, surrounded by lantana brush, a flowering shrub 

 with close-growing stems, perhaps twenty feet high and 

 no thicker than a man's thumb ; it forms a favourite 

 cover for elephants and rhinoceros, and is wellnigh 

 impenetrable to hunters. Fortunately this particular 

 rhino was outside it, and Kermit and Tarlton got up to 

 about twenty-five yards from him. Kermit then put 

 one bullet behind his shoulder, and as he whipped round 

 to charge, another bullet on the point of his shoulder. 

 Although mortally wounded, he showed no signs what- 

 ever of being hurt, and came at the hunters with great 

 speed and savage desire to do harm. Then an extra- 

 ordinary thing happened. Tarlton fired, inflicting 

 merely a flesh-wound in one shoulder, and the big, 

 fearsome brute, which had utterly disregarded the two 

 fatal shots, on receiving this flesh wound wheeled and 

 ran. Botli firing, they killed him before he had gone 

 many yards. He was a bull, with a thirty-inch horn. 



By this time Cuniiighame and Heller had finished the 

 skin and skeleton of the bull they were preserving. 

 Near the carcass Heller trapped an old male leopard — a 



