202 IN AFRICA 



amine them with our glasses. One seemed to have 

 no tusks, but we finally saw that it had very small 

 ones. The other and larger one had one good tusk 

 and one that was broken off. After about twenty 

 minutes we left our horses and with only our gun- 

 bearers moved across toward them, thinking that 

 there must be others that we had not yet seen. The 

 wind was bad, sometimes sweeping up in our direc- 

 tion through the depression between the two slopes 

 and a moment later coming from another direction. 

 At one time the wind blew from us directly toward 

 the elephants and we expected to see them take 

 alarm and run away. But they did not. We circled 

 around and approached them from a better direc- 

 tion and advanced to within a couple of hundred 

 yards without being detected. We then stopped for 

 a conference. If there was a young bull I was to 

 kill it for the Akeley group; if there was a large 

 bull Stephenson was to kill it for himself; if there 

 were only cows we were not to shoot unless abso- 

 lutely necessary. In this event, Akeley was to take 

 his camera, and with "Fred," "Jimmy" Clark, 

 and I as escorts with our double-barreled cordite 

 rifles, was to advance until he could get a photo- 

 graph that would show an elephant the full size of 

 the plate. If the elephants charged we were to yell 

 and try to turn them without shooting; if they came 

 on we were to shoot to hurt, but not to kill. 



Fred was on one side of "Ake," Jimmy on an- 

 other, and I on Fred's left. Thus we slowly moved 

 toward the elephants. A reedbuck was startled out 



