ELEPHANTS UNABLE TO JUMP 293 



yeta ' railway train and as you can imagine, sir, I fled 

 through those thorny bushes as fast as I could go, regardless of 

 the pain I was enduring ; but such great difficulty had I in 

 keeping out of reach of the elephant, which was at times only 

 a few feet behind me, that I would most certainly have been 

 caught up and trampled to death ere I had gone very far, if by 

 a good chance I had not stumbled head-first into a dry 

 water-course, some 7 or 8 feet deep, and about the same in 

 breadth, and escaped. I was laid up for days afterwards, 

 owing to my legs becoming inflamed by the very severe tear- 

 ing and scratching they underwent when running away from 

 this elephant." 



It is a well-known fact that elephants cannot take all four 

 feet off the ground together, and that they can only step over 

 a crevasse or gap that comes within the compass of their 

 stride, which is never more than 7 or 8 feet at the outside, 

 so that a man chased by an elephant can clear a fifteen- 

 foot nullah or chasm, land on the other side, and turn round 

 and fire at the animal, unless of course the ground permits 

 of it running down the side of the one bank and up the other. 

 As a rule, however, a narrow nullah, 8 or 10 feet wide and 

 the same in depth, is quite impassable to an elephant. I had 

 a short conversation at Edinburgh the other day with the 

 owner of perhaps the best troupe of performing elephants in 

 the world, and he informed me that he had taught these 

 animals to do almost anything except jump, and although 

 he had tried again and again, he had so far utterly failed in 

 his efforts ; whether he has since succeeded I cannot say. 

 These elephants were, by the way, procured from Maulmain, 

 in Burma. 



My first elephant, a small tusker, was bagged in the Nam- 

 pan forest in the Shan States of Momeik, Ruby Mines district, 

 whilst on a two months' shooting expedition. My hunters 

 and I were on the move one morning early through the jungle 

 on the look-out for fresh gaur tracks, when the snapping of 

 a twig in a bush skirting a water-course about 20 yards 

 ahead of us attracted our attention. On hearing the sound I 

 thought we had either got on to a herd of gaur or a solitary 

 bull, and immediately pushed forward as quietly and as 



