HUNTING & SHOOTING IN CEYLON 



result being I lost my elephant. As I was curiously ex- 

 amining it, less than a minute after the shot, it got up with 

 amazing suddenness and started for the jungle at express 

 speed. I hurriedly fired at its head but with no result, 

 and away it went, blood pouring out of the first wound 

 in torrents, we tearing after it. We tracked it for miles, 

 and it bled to such a frightful extent that I got covered with 

 blood pushing through the undergrowth on its track, and 

 wonder to this day how any animal could have lost blood 

 to such an extent and yet live. It never stopped moving, 

 and after some miles the blood got fainter and fainter, 

 finally giving out altogether. We at last gave up and 

 returned to camp, but we took up the track again next 

 day and followed it until it became hopeless, for the animal 

 had never stopped travelling. I heard of an elephant suffer- 

 ing from a bad wound in the head being killed some weeks 

 after this away in the Northern Province, which might easily 

 have been this same one. Thus was I taught for the third 

 time that an 8-bore, if your aim errs by the slightest degree, 

 is just as fallible as any other weapon. However, nothing 

 daunted, next morning I got word that the other elephant 

 accused of damage, which frequented the jungle on another 

 side of the village, had during the night about devastated 

 a small paddy field, so off we set again. We took up the 

 track, the footprints being very large, at the said paddy 

 field, in which the young growing paddy had been all eaten 

 or trampled into mud, and followed it many miles through 

 forest, finally coming into some awful thorny scrub inter- 

 spersed with little stretches of bare, sandy, quartzy ground 

 so poor as not to even grow grass. The elephant had 

 followed these stretches of open as they like easy walking, 

 and we presently came upon him standing dozing in the 

 middle of a small pool of water occupying a tiny hollow 



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