ELEPHANT HUNTING 287 



may be resting; yet, during the hottest hours of noon they 

 seldom feed, and ordinarily stand almost still, resting for 

 elephant very rarely lie down unless sick. Where they are 

 afraid of man, their only enemy, they come out to feed in 

 thinly forested plains, or cultivated fields, when they do so 

 at all, only at night, and before daybreak move back into 

 the forest to rest. Elsewhere they sometimes spend the 

 day in the open, in grass or low bush. Where we were, 

 at this time, on Kenia, the elephants sometimes moved 

 down at night to feed in the shambas, at the expense of 

 the crops of the natives, and sometimes stayed in the forest, 

 feeding by day or night on the branches they tore off the 

 trees, or, occasionally, on the roots they grubbed up with 

 their tusks. They work vast havoc among the young or 

 small growth of a forest, and the readiness with which they 

 uproot, overturn, or break off medium-sized trees conveys 

 a striking impression of their enormous strength. I have 

 seen a tree a foot in diameter thus uprooted and over- 

 turned. 



The African elephant has never, like his Indian kins- 

 man, been trained to man's use. There is still hope that 

 the feat may be performed; but hitherto its probable eco- 

 nomic usefulness has for various reasons seemed so ques- 

 tionable that there has been scant encouragement to un- 

 dergo the necessary expense and labor. Up to the present 

 time the African elephant has yielded only his ivory as an 

 asset of value. This, however, has been of such great value 

 as wellnigh to bring about the mighty beast's utter extermi- 

 nation. Ivory hunters and ivory traders have penetrated 

 Africa to the haunts of the elephant since centuries before 

 our era, and the elephant's boundaries have been slowly 

 receding throughout historic time; but during the century 

 just past its process has been immensely accelerated, until 

 now there are but one or two out-of-the-way nooks of the 

 Dark Continent to the neighborhood of which hunter and 

 trader have not penetrated. Fortunately the civilized pow- 

 ers which now divide dominion over Africa have waked 



