CHAPTER VII 
HUNTING ELEPHANT AND RIDING LION 
NE beautiful morning in late September, with a large 
sefari, we moved from our camp on the stream that 
borders the open treeless country, and set our faces once 
again toward the Rock. 
The plateau had already yielded specimens of all the 
game frequenting it excepting elephant. “These, too, we 
followed on our first visit, but had not had the luck to come 
on any with sufficiently big tusks to warrant our shooting. 
In May, June, and July the herbage here is short, thorn 
trees have not put forth their new shoots, and elephant 
are not tempted to stay and eat. If they visited the 
country, the probability was they would pass rapidly 
across it to the better feeding grounds that Mount Elgon 
or Kamasea afforded them. Now, in September and Oc- 
tober everything — grass and reed and tree — had attained 
their semi-annual growth, and the thorn groves were just 
as the elephant like to have them. So we came hoping 
for great things. 
If elephants cross the treeless part of this land, they do 
so usually at night. Unless they are in a country where 
they are little disturbed, they very seldom venture into 
the open flat during the hours of broad daylight. Knowing 
this we had no expectation of seeing anything of them until 
we had reached their usual stopping places and feeding 
grounds, among the many square miles of thorn dotted 
country that extends from ten miles north of Sergoit into 
and beyond the wide bend that the Nzoia River makes, as 
it flows from Kamasea and Cherangang Mountains on the. ~ 
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