A Check 89 



What added materially to the annoyance of losing 

 the spare guns was the thoughtless character of the 

 advance. I felt sure that these fellows would outrun 

 the position of the eleptiants, which, if they had con- 

 tinued in a direct route, should have entered the jungle 

 within three hundred yards of our first station. 



We had slipped, and plunged, and struggled over 

 this distance, when we suddenly were checked in our 

 advance. We had entered a small plot of deep mud 

 and rank grass, surrounded upon all sides by dense rat- 

 tan jungle. The stuff is one woven mass of hooked 

 thorns : long tendrils, armed in the same manner, al- 

 though not thicker than a whip-cord, wind themselves 

 round the parent canes and form a jungle which even 

 elephants dislike to enter. To man, these jungles are 

 perfectly impervious. 



Half-way to our knees in mud, we stood in this small 

 open space of about thirty feet by twenty. Around us 

 was an opaque screen of this impenetrable jungle ; the 

 lake lay about fifty yards upon our left, behind the thick 

 rattan. The gun-bearers were gone ahead somewhere, 

 and were far in advance. We were at a stand-still. 

 Leaning upon my long rifle, I stood within four feet 

 of the wall of jungle which divided us from the lake. 

 I said to B., " The trackers are all wrong, and have 

 gone too far. I am convinced that the elephants must 

 have entered somewhere near this place." 



Little did I think that at that very moment they were 

 within a few feet of us. B. was standing behind me 

 on the opposite side of the small open, or about seven 

 yards from the jungle. 



I suddenly heard a deep guttural sound in the thick 

 rattan within four feet of me ; in the same instant the 

 8* 



