THE ELEPHANT 
and all other heavy game, and though they are more expensive than a 
Winchester, their cost would be very much less than that of a double- 
barrelled cordite rifle by any of the best makers. 
For body shots, the upper part of the heart and the lungs are, as in all 
other animals, the vital spots to aim for in an elephant’s anatomy, and 
these organs are situated in the same relative positions as in all other 
animals. Only long experience can teach a man where exactly is the best 
place to hit an elephant, from every possible point of view from which he 
may have to take the shot. If an elephant is standing broadside on, a shot 
entering the head just beneath the orifice of the ear should reach the brain 
and cause instant death, whilst a bullet through the centre of the shoulder 
would pierce the heart. A shot placed rather high up on an elephant’s body, 
just where the outside edge of the broadest part of the great ear rests 
on it, ought to pass through the big blood-vessels of both lungs, and if so, 
will soon cause death; and this lung shot (it must penetrate both lungs to 
be fatal) has the great advantage over a heart shot that it will cause 
great quantities of blood to be thrown from the wounded animal’s trunk, 
and render tracking very easy to the spot where it will be found lying dead, 
whilst an elephant shot through the heart may only bleed internally and 
be very difficult to follow, if its tracks are intermixed with those of other 
elephants. Should one of these animals be shot through the top of the heart, 
or through the large blood-vessels immediately above the heart, it will 
fall dead after making a short rush of from fifty to one hundred and fifty 
yards; but there can be no doubt that an elephant shot through the lower 
part of the heart will sometimes travel quite a long distance before dying. 
Should one fire for an elephant’s lungs and hit it somewhat too high, the 
bullet may touch and jar the vertebral column and cause the animal to 
fall as if shot through the brain. If in such a case the back be broken, the 
animal will not be able to rise again, but should the bullet have only 
grazed the backbone, it will get up again, sometimes immediately after 
falling down, sometimes after having lain motionless for quite a long 
time; so that in elephant shooting it is always advisable, when one of 
these animals falls to the shot, to at once run up behind it and put in a 
second bullet at the back of the head. 
I am told that with a modern high-velocity cordite rifle a charging 
elephant can be killed with a shot in front of the head; but if this is really 
the case, from the position in which an elephant holds its head when 
charging, a bullet, to reach its brain, must strike it well below the line of 
II 
