20 
THREE MONTHS IN PAHANG 
news I heard that there was a solitary elephant near by, so on 
the following morning, instead of leaving at da) Hght, I went 
to inspect the tracks* Those I saw must have been 
months old, and were not the tracks of a big elephant. 
Starting late from Kuala Tekal we poled up to the mouth 
of the Krau Kiver whicli we reached at about three o'clock- 
I stopped there for a few minutes to try and see Imam Dollah, 
an old Malay who lives at the mouth of the Krau and 
who can give one most of the news that is going, but unfortu- 
nately he was away in his rice fields and I did not want to 
dek}- my journey so entered the Krau. 
What sad memories this river calls to one's mind. It 
was here, not very far from the Kuala, were Captain Syers, one 
of the truest sportsmen that ever Hved in the Malay States,, 
met his death when hunting seladang. I have been through 
that part of the jungle where poor Syers was charged for the 
last time by a wounded bull seladang, and although I did not 
know the exact spot where the tragedy took place, the 
denseness and thickness of the under;:; rowth shewed to me 
easil)' enough how an accident might happen. The water 
in the river was very low, and we had doubts about being able 
to get up to the Sakai clearings, which were some consider- 
able distance up the river. During the two days that it took 
us to get there w^e were out of the boat pulling it over logs and 
sand banks as often as we were in the boat. On tlie second 
night we camped near an old clearing where I shot the big 
seladang whose photograph I have already shown you. Here 
we found the tracks of a solitary bull seladang, but he did not 
put in an appearance that night, so in the morning we 
continued our journey and arrived late in the afternoon at the 
first Sakai encampment near Kuala Lempat, where we 
camped for the night. 
There is a large collection of Sakais here, and we 
soon got on friendly terms with an old man who could 
talk Malay quite fluently and who gave m a good deal 
of information. He told us that the headmen, who went 
by the names of the Batin Ulu and the Batin Hiiir, two 
brothers, lived some- half a day's journey up the river, that 
there were reported to be many seladang near where the 
Batins lived and that he would send up messengers on 
the morrow to bring them down here. In the meantime, 
if we wanted to go after seladang close to, he would go with 
us to a place called Bukit Ta Simpai, where there were many 
old clearings and where we would be certain to find seladang. 
This arrangement quite suited me as one can readily imagine, 
so that night we slept the sleep of the just, or perhaps I 
