8o /;/(/ GAME SHOOTING 



the same still. The young calves, too, are the smallest beasts 

 for the size they afterwards attain, and must take a long while 

 growing. Such tinies are they that I have had them run under 

 my pony, and touched their little pinky bodies with my foot 

 poor morsels ! I never could shoot the female with any satis- 

 faction, and I think I never did at all but twice ; males were 

 plentiful enough. 



Men differ as to the height of the African elephant. I have 

 seen thousands, and shot the largest one I ever saw. I measured 

 him, and he was 12 ft. 2 in. I have heard of one 17 feet high, 

 but I did not see him, and it is long ago, so perhaps he was 

 the last of the giants ! A tusk was exhibited in the African 

 Exhibition in Regent Street, in 1890, by Sir Edmund Loder. 

 It weighed 180 Ibs. odd, and was by far the heaviest single 

 tusk known, I should suppose ; but I have been shown a pair, 

 303 Ibs. and 9 feet in length. My largest f rophy was rather under 

 8 feet long, and the pair weighed between 230 and 240 Ibs. 

 They belonged to a bull I killed on the Zouga ; he was the 

 smallest old one I shot in Africa not more than 9 feet 

 high. I went out with John one bitter morning to provide 

 food for the camp, and, having dropped a white rhinoceros, 

 made for the waggons to get hot coffee and breakfast. On the 

 way we came across an elephant, its head entirely hidden by a 

 thick bush. Thinking, from its size, it was a cow, I was passing 

 it unnoticed, when John, with the desire, I suppose, of adding 

 to his collection of tails, begged me to shoot it. I fired, and 

 down went the bush, as, with a shrill trumpet, the elephant 

 trampled through it, disclosing nearly six feet of naked ivory, 

 over the curve ; so long were the tusks, and so diminutive their 

 owner, that the points barely cleared the ground. A second 

 ball finished him. 



The drier the country the smaller the elephants. On the 

 Limpopo the average height of the bulls was 1 1 feet, on the Zouga 

 and through the Kalahari 10 feet. The ivory of the smaller kind 

 was larger and, I am told, closer in grain. These tusks, which 

 are deposited by a gum, are very slow of growth ; and the molar 



