CHAPTER VII 



HUNTING ELEPHANT AND RIDING LION 



ONE beautiful morning in late September, with a large 

 sefari, we moved from our camp on the stream that 

 borders the open treeless country, and set our faces once 

 again toward the Rock. 



The plateau had already yielded specimens of all the 

 game frequenting it excepting elephant. These, too, we 

 followed on our first visit, but had not had the luck to come 

 on any with sufficiently big tusks to warrant our shooting. 

 In May, June, and July the herbage here is short, thorn 

 trees have not put forth their new shoots, and elephant 

 are not tempted to stay and eat. If they visited the 

 country, the probability was they would pass rapidly 

 across it to the better feeding grounds that Mount Elgon 

 or Kamasea afforded them. Now, in September and Oc- 

 tober everything grass and reed and tree had attained 

 their semi-annual growth, and the thorn groves were just 

 as the elephant like to have them. So we came hoping 

 for great things. 



If elephants cross the treeless part of this land, they do 

 so usually at night. Unless they are in a country where 

 they are little disturbed, they very seldom venture into 

 the open flat during the hours of broad daylight. Knowing 

 this we had no expectation of seeing anything of them until 

 we had reached their usual stopping places and feeding 

 grounds, among the many square miles of thorn dotted 

 country that extends from ten miles north of Sergoit into 

 and beyond the wide bend that the Nzoia River makes, as 

 it flows from Kamasea and Cherangang Mountains on the 



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