384 THE ELEPHANT. 



fast as my aching bones would allow me ; but 

 observing that she turned round, and looked back 

 towards me, before entering the bush, I lay down 

 in the long grass, by which means I escaped her 

 observation." 



The life of the professed elephant-hunter is one 

 of great peril and privation, and there are few who 

 engage in it that do not, sooner or later, " go to 



the wall." I was surprised to hear D say," so 



writes Mr. Kose, " that it was his wish to leave his 

 present life, and to settle down quietly on his farm. 

 ' Indeed,' I said, ' I should have thought that this 

 wild pursuit, and your former dangerous trade 

 (that of a smuggler), would render a quiet life some- 

 what sleepy.' ' I have a wife now, and shall have 

 children,' he replied, ' and have been driven to 

 this by debt and necessity. I have nearly got over 

 my difficulties, for in twenty months I and my 

 Hottentots have killed eight hundred elephants ; 

 four hundred of them have fallen to this good gun, 

 and when I am free I quit it. Scores of times have 

 the elephants charged around me, even within a 

 yard of the bush under which I had crept; and I 

 feel that it was a chance I was not crushed. Once 

 I had fired at a large troop in a deep ravine, one 

 side of which was formed by a steep cliff, which 

 echoed back the sound of the firing, and a hundred 

 elephants, with upraised ears, and loud screams, 

 and tossing trunks, rushed down the narrow pass, 

 and charged the echo, being the opposite side to that 

 where we stood when we fired, and the one to which 

 we had now moved ; myself and Hottentots lying 



