80 BIG 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 lbs. odd, and was by far the heaviest single 
tusk known, I should suppose ; but I have been shown a pair, 
303 lbs. and g feet inlength. My largest trophy 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 9g 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 theaverage height of the bulls was 11 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 
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