ELEPHANT HUNTING 261 



look for elephants, followed by our gun-bearers and half a 

 dozen wild Meru hunters, each carrying a spear or a bow 

 and arrows. When we reached the hunting grounds, open 

 country with groves of trees and patches of jungle, the 

 Meru went off in every direction to find elephant. We 

 waited their return under a tree, by a big stretch of culti- 

 vated ground. The region was well peopled, and all the 

 way down the path had led between fields, which the Meru 

 women were tilling with their adze-like hoes, and banana 

 plantations, where among the bananas other trees had 

 been planted, and the yam vines trained up their trunks. 

 These cool, shady banana plantations, fenced in with tall 

 hedges and bordered by rapid brooks, were really very 

 attractive. Among them were scattered villages of conical 

 thatched huts, and level places plastered with cow dung 

 on which the grain was threshed; it was then stored in huts 

 raised on posts. There were herds of cattle, and flocks of 

 sheep and goats; and among the burdens the women 

 bore we often saw huge bottles of milk. In the shambas 

 there were platforms, and sometimes regular thatched huts, 

 placed in the trees; these were for the watchers, who 

 were to keep the elephants out of the shambas at night. 

 Some of the natives wore girdles of banana leaves, looking, 

 as Kermit said, much like the pictures of savages in Sun- 

 day-school books. 



Early in the afternoon some of the scouts returned 

 with news that three bull elephants were in a piece of for- 

 est a couple of miles distant, and thither we went. It 

 was an open grove of heavy thorn timber beside a strip of 

 swamp; among the trees the grass grew tall, and there 

 were many thickets of abutilon, a flowering shrub a dozen 



