WHAT BECOMES OF DEAD ELEPHANTS? 127 



sariat officer doubtless made a note of the date, and should be 

 now in a position to state how long gestation took place ; and 

 if the young ones brought forth from this connection live, the 

 generation living about 2136 or thereabouts should be able to 

 settle as to the longevity or otherwise of these most useful 

 beasts. 



There is, or was, a saying that no one had ever seen in 

 England a dead donkey or a postboy. Many sportsmen who 

 have spent a lifetime in jungles infested with these pachy- 

 derms wonder what becomes of the remains of elephants who 

 die a natural death. Sanderson, Sir S. Baker, and others, all 

 assert that they have never come across a dead elephant. 

 Mr. Cameron says : " The remains of defunct elephants may 

 escape the casual notice of a comparatively few sportsmen 

 absorbed in the eager, and not seldom dangerous, pursuit of 

 living game ; with the dead elephant, as with a dead stag, 

 carnivorous animals consume the decomposing flesh ; deer 

 and oxen chew and scatter the dismembered bones ; the grass 

 grows, and withers upon what is left ; a bone here and there 

 may arrest the passing eye, yet tell no story to the preoccu- 

 pied mind." 



He mentions also that Captain Swayne, visiting the exact 

 spot where a large bull elephant had been killed two years 

 previously, found after careful search nothing but the jaw- 

 bones with the grinders embedded in them, and was assured by 

 his Somalis that the skeleton had been completely disposed of 

 by the domestic cattle and the koodoos. 



This may apply to sportsmen solely, but in my own case it 

 is different. I was not only a sportsman but an engineer 

 employed in opening out countries little known ; for this 

 purpose I had hundreds of men employed in cutting traces 

 through the enormous savannahs of Assam and Burma 

 countries where wild elephants are probably more numerous 

 than in Ceylon or Southern India. I had to traverse these at 

 all seasons, even in the rains ; if I could not go by elephants I 

 had to go by boat. I had to burn these jungles yearly in all 

 for over twenty-one years. Yet I have never come across the 

 body of an elephant that died a natural death, though I have 

 seen hundreds of carcases of deer, gaur, gayal, buffalo, and 



