14 Great and Small Game of Africa 



their structure. The portions of an elephant most fancied by the vanished 

 race of professional hunters in South Africa were the heart, the thick part 

 of the trunk, the fat meat contained in the large hollow above the eye, 

 and the foot. The first was most excellent, as were all the other parts 

 mentioned when sufficiently cooked, though the last required to be roasted 

 (in its skin) in a hole dug in the ground over which a large fire was 

 constantly kept burning for about forty-eight hours, when the inside became 

 gelatinous, and could be scooped out with a spoon. In taste it resembled 

 calf s head. In the centre of the hollows above the eyes of the African 

 elephant there are small holes or ducts which pierce the skin, and through 

 which the animal appears to perspire, as this part of its head always looks 

 black and damp after a run in the hot sun. The strange thing is that these 

 ducts are almost invariably found plugged with bits of stick, which are 

 sometimes about half the thickness of a lead pencil. In 1 874 the late 

 Mr. J. L. Garden and myself cut out a number of these bits of twigs. At 

 first we could not believe that they were pieces, of stick, but we shaved 

 the bark off some of them and satisfied ourselves on that point. The 

 question arises, how does almost every elephant come to have these two 

 little ducts on each side of its head plugged with bits of twigs. One could 

 understand that in going through the bush, the end of a twig might 

 occasionally get forced into one of these tiny ducts accidentally ; but so far 

 as I remember, every elephant we examined had at least one duct stopped 

 up, and usually both. The ends of these little bits of sticks never showed 

 from the outside, and we found the first by accident and afterwards always 

 looked tor them. Our bushmen maintained that the elephants inserted 

 these little pieces of stick into the ducts above their eyes themselves, 

 but would not hazard an opinion as to the object of so curious a 

 custom. I do not remember ever to have seen this point referred 

 to, and it is a somewhat curious one. Before the introduction of 

 firearms elephants were killed by the natives of the interior of South 



