SKELETONIZING AN ELEPHANT. 163 



On they came, and we saw there were five tuskers. This time I 

 made my calculations more carefully than before, fired confidently, 

 and my %dctim sank down in his tracks Avithout a groan, and died 

 without a kick. Being well below our position, he received my 

 spherical zinc bullet high up on the left side of his head, whence it 

 ranged downward, passing through eleven inches of bone and 

 eleven inches of brain, and came out well below his right ear. 

 I regret to say that he was not the largest tusker in the herd,* 

 being sui-passed by one other which was so surrounded by other 

 elephants that he was practically inaccessible, and therefore the 

 victory was not as great as it might have been. 



We returned to camp directly, and ordered all the women and 

 children to start at once for Toonacadavoo. We had a big secret 

 to keep, and preferred to manage it without any of their assistance. 

 W^omen can keep a secret very closely, but it usually requires a 

 great many of them to accomplish it. As soon as the women had 

 been bundled off, bag and baggage, I told my men, through my 

 cook-interpreter, that no other person besides ourselves must ever 

 hear anything about that dead elephant, for should it get found 

 out we would all get into trouble. They declared the secret should 

 die with them. Then my new servant, Mullen, a private peon lent 

 me by IVIr. Theobald, resorted to a little device to play upon the 

 suj^erstitious feelings of the Mulcers. 



Mullen was a Mohammedan, and a very shrewd fellow every way. 

 He took m}' two big guns, laid them upon the ground, one across 

 the other, with the hammers at full cock, and laid my largest hunt- 

 ing-knife—an infant broad-sword, which I never once carried — uj)on 

 the guns, where they crossed each other. Then he ordered my five 

 Mulcers to walk up on one side of the altar, and told the first man, 

 Channa, to hold up his hands. Channa did so, whereupon the 

 peon administered a sort of double-geared, self-acting oath or in- 

 vocation, which translated ran about as follows : "Evei-ybody sees 

 that Channa promises before his sawmy {i.e., his favorite god) and 

 these horrible makers-of-dead-animals, that he will never tell any 

 man, woman, or child anything about the. dead elephant, and what 

 the 'Merican sahib is about to do with it ; and that he (Channa) 

 begs his sawmy to remember, and if he ever does tell about it he 

 prays that his sawmy will send a man to shoot him with one of 

 these guns and stab him with that knife, or one just as large." 

 Channa repeats the oath, steps over the " makers-of-dead-animals," 

 and the ceremony is complete. Each of the others followed in 



