HIS DEATH. l6l 
of a hill down which the elephant had zigzagged at a walk 
On rounding some thick bushes the man in front of me 
pointed, and there was the huge monster standing in some 
water. Pushing Brooke to the front he steadily raised his 
rifle, and aiming at the orifice of the ear let drive, and down 
came the grand old tusker with a crash, sending up the water 
far above our heads. It was a long shot — twenty-seven 
yards. I ran down to the elephant, and seeing he was not 
dead Brooke killed him by a shot in the back of his head, and 
thus died the largest and toughest old tusker I ever came 
across ; a grand trophy. His tusk measured five feet eleven 
inches outside the lip, and carefully measuring him we made 
him exactly eleven feet high with an enormously thick neck ; 
although he showed no signs of great age except in his feet, 
he must have been, I think, a very old animal. We had 
seven miles to get home, but right cheerfully we accom- 
plished the journey, Brooke doing the greater part of it with 
only one shoe. We did not arrive at the bungalow till long 
after dark. 
We devoted the greater part of the next day to cutting 
out the tusks, and a long business it was. The broken tusk 
was in a very decayed state, and the foetid odour from it 
almost unbearable. How the poor brute must have suffered ! 
In respect to the tusks of this elephant the following 
letter in the Field newspaper, from the late Sir Victor 
Brooke, settles the question as to their size and weight : — 
*• SiR^Will you kindly allow me to correct a mistake 
in your correspondent ' Smoothbore's * letter, published under 
the above heading in your issue of the ist inst. In his 
letter ' Smoothbore ' states that the weight of the large tusk 
of the elephant shot by me in the Hassanoor Hills, Southern 
II 
